Re: Modeling relations and semantics

[John M <***>]

I try to put Carlos' remark about Tim's words and
Calvin's explanatory par-s into some 'simple'(?) words
and wonder if I skewed them away?

Encoding into a formal system means to me 'modeling'
an aspect (part) chosen as the topic of our interest.
It cuts off the rest of it. That may be measurement as
well since if I measure the length of a wire, I leave
out the electric potential or alloy composition of it.

So far so good, I have a model. 
Now comes the jhard part: to draw conclusions from
that (measurement) 'model' onto the natural
system??????
>From "pars to totum"? the model does not include any
part of the natural system beyond its boundaries, HOW
ON EARTH can I draw conclusions on the indisclosed
rest of the natural system?

Did I misread the post?

John Mikes

--- Calvin Ostrum <***> wrote:

> Carlos Limarino writes:
> 
> > So, I have exactly the same problem with Tim Gwinn
> > definition. Is 'encoding' a measurement or not? If
> it
> > is a measurement, the idea they manifest "free
> > creations of the human mind" (except, in the
> trivial
> > sense that the measurement instrument was maybe
> > manipulated by a human body which we ascribe the
> > possession of a mind) is very dubious to me.
> 
> Maybe I should not butt in, but based on my
> reading (and only that and nothing more, thus
> rather a stab in the dark) I would interpret 
> it like this: encodings of a natural system 
> into a formal system are measurements, 
> and free creations, in the sense that 
> you are faced with reality just being out
> there, and then you yourself decide what 
> operations to perform on that reality in order
> to come up with measurements that can 
> then be encoded into a formal system.   The
> idea is then that the formal system allows
> you to make inferences which after decoding
> will tell you something about the natural
> system you are modelling.   Wow!  What is
> so profound about this? It is just common 
> sense.
> 
> Since you can make the measurements 
> with the intention of encoding them into any of 
> many formal systems you might have at the ready,  
> in effect, it is really the formal system, along
> with a general strategy for linking it up to
> the natural system, that is the free creation.   
> You are laying the formal system as a 
> grid over reality, and it may fit better 
> or worse depending upon the encoding/decoding 
> system that in effect constitutes 
> the "laying over of the grid".
> 
> One thing that does not appear to be
> discussed is that the way that a whole
> system or strategy of measurement must
> hang together.   Otherwise, the 
> measurements are indeed too free.
> Your encoding and decoding maps, in
> other words, could be arbitrarily 
> gerrymandered and/or disjunctive.
> 
> The reductionistic aspect of this is also
> somewhat disturbing.  Reality is reduced
> to a set of human-employed models and
> their fit with objectively arbitrary human 
> means of perception.   Both of these
> problems can be addressed by taking
> a more objective view (Reading the
> introduction of Thomas Nagel's
> "The View From Nowhere" is
> helpful in this regard).
> 
> 
> > Are you using 'entailed' in some Rosennean notion?
> I'm
> > afraid I can't make any clear sense of what
> > 'entailment' means in Rosen's words. I asked Tim
> Gwinn
> > about this, but could you give me a definition of
> > 'entailment' in Rosen's terms? To give you an
> idea, I
> > don't know how to look at Rosen's diagram in the
> book
> > (Life Itself) and say the arrows he labels as
> > 'encoding' and 'decoding' are 'not entailed in the
> > diagram'.
> 
> Entailment on the left side is causality, on the
> right side, it is inference.  Of course, in general
> causality is not going to "commute" with inference,
> whatever this means, precisely, since 
> causality has a temporal direction, for example,
> and has complete, standard "inputs", whereas
> inference has no temporal direction or standard
> "inputs" (you can infer about the past, or based on
> disjunctive information, etc).  This is probably 
> why these diagrams, so fondly copied, never 
> go beyond the vague  (1) = (2) + (3) + (4) 
> stage.   Anyway, to attempt to 
> answer your question then, the (2) and
> (4) are neither causal nor inferential, hence they
> are "unentailed".  
> 
> (Think "context of justification" versus 
> "context of discovery")
> 
> Of course, if you want to become more objective,
> you will examine the person as a modeller, and
> the processes he goes through, in which case 
> his activities of choosing (2) and (4) are entailed
> in both senses: they are part of the space of
> causes and part of the space of reasons both, to
> use Wilfrid Sellars's apt terms.
>  
> > I don't know if I understand it in the sense you
> want
> > it. If the idea is that the instrument used for
> > measure a physical quantity is not part of the
> system
> > being measured, that seems rather obvious to me,
> but
> > I'm afraid I don't see how to relate the
> metaphysical
> > idea of the existence of different objects to the
> idea
> > that a meter or some other instrument is a
> semantic
> > element to a given system, since when I replace m
> and
> > v in 'Et=1/2m*v^2' with the same numbers it gives
> me
> > the same result, independently how I measured mass
> or
> > velocity
> 
> Yes, this is related to the point I made before
> about
> the arbitrariness of the human means of perception
> when it comes to the models.   Philosophers of
> science
> have been far more sophisticated about this than
> Rosen in general, such as for example when they
> talk about auxiliary hypotheses being necessary to
> draw inferences from a scientific theory.   The
> auxiliary hypothesis are part of what makes up
> the encodings and decodings in this more traditional
> context.  
> 
> > As you surely understand, since Rosen said:
> > "I have been, and remain, entirely committed to
> the
> > idea that modeling is the essence of science and
> the
> > habitat of all epistemology."
> 
> It's hard to see any clear way that Rosen's
> discussion of this goes beyond all the discussion
> engaged in by philosophers of science in general.
> 
> > And the fact he bases controversial claims about
> the
> > epistemological status of sciences like physics,
> > chemistry and molecular biology in his notion of
> > 'modeling relation', I think is very important to
> > define clearly and rigorous the whole idea in
> order to
> > determine if is coherent from a logical point
> view.
> 
>  Good luck!
>