In what aspect is your idea of pragmatism supposed to differ from general semantics with the slogan “The map is not the territory”?
I’m not requiring that “territory” be a coherent concept at all. Suppositions about territories are models that my epistemology evaluates rather than assumptions built into the epistemology.
That’s a claim about ontology not a claim about epistemology. When it comes to modern source I consider Barry Smith worth reading. He’s doing practical ontology for bioinformatical problems.
If you like, you can think of this as a an ontological critique of most epistemologies. I wouldn’t like to phrase it that way, though.
I’m not requiring that “territory” be a coherent concept at all.
What do you mean with “coherent” concept inside pragmatism? In what sense does a pragmatist worry about whether or not something is coherent?
At the moment most of what you wrote seems like a bunch of catch phrase without a look at the deeper issues. General Semantics has in addition to it’s nice slogan a bunch of thoughts about how to think.
I wouldn’t like to phrase it that way, though.
Why? What wrong with the word ontology? I think you get into problems if you want to do ontology but refuse to think of yourself as doing ontology.
What do you mean with “coherent” concept inside pragmatism? In what sense does a pragmatist worry about whether or not something is coherent?
“Coherent” is a stand-in for some worries I have: Does having our epistemology underpinned by a model-reality relationship skew our motivations for creating models? Does it close certain fruitful paths by making us believe they are epistemically nonsensical or questionable? Does it have significant limitations in where it can be fruitfully applied and how? I think the answer to each is yes, which motivates me to get rid of the model-reality relationship from my core epistemology. Although of course I consider it perfectly legitimate to use that relationship as a heuristic in the context of a pragmatic background epistemology.
Why? What wrong with the word ontology? I think you get into problems if you want to do ontology but refuse to think of yourself as doing ontology.
It’s not that I refuse. I just don’t put much stock in the distinction between epistemology and ontology. I think they’re entangled, and that pretending they aren’t leads to confusion (see the p-zombie debate, for example).
I didn’t really bring out the ontological elements of what I was doing in this post, and I recognised that afterward. I’ll fix that oversight later.
Does it close certain fruitful paths by making us believe they are epistemically nonsensical or questionable?
Thinking that there is a reality out there that’s separate from you model means that you can’t do magic “Law of attraction” stuff where you change the territory by changing your model. You reject a whole bunch of mysticism that presupposes that model and territory are the same.
Do you think that some of that mysticism is a fruitful path that get’s wrongly rejected?
Does having our epistemology underpinned by a model-reality relationship skew our motivations for creating models?
Different people have quite different motivations for creating models. There are logical positivists who think that the only goal of a model is to represent reality as accurately as possible. That doesn’t mean that everyone who considers map and territory separate holds that extremist position.
If I look at the public transportation map of Berlin then the distances between places aren’t very accurate. The map isn’t designed for that purpose. That doesn’t make it a bad map and I can still mentally distinguish the territory of Berlin from the map.
Do you think that some of that mysticism is a fruitful path that get’s wrongly rejected?
No, but that’s because I’ve seen it in action and noted that I don’t have much use for it, and not because I’ve constructed an epistemology that proscribes it altogether.
I don’t see the point of barring paths as inherently epistemically irrational. I would rather let anyone judge for themselves which tools would be appropriate or inappropriate, and model the success or failures in whichever way helps them choose tools more effectively later.
For example there’s a commonly held belief that we shouldn’t believe two mutually contradictory models since they can’t both describe reality and at least one of them will lead us astray. In other words it isn’t epistemically rational to believe both. I want to scrap judgements like that from the underpinnings of our epistemology, because that really does close fruitful paths. During revolutions in physics, after one theory gains a slight advantage the competitors all die out. I would like to see more of a plurality, so that we can have multiple tools in our arsenal with different potential uses. Rather than deciding that I can believe only one, I’ll say that I can use any to the extent that they work, and I will hold beliefs about where and how I can apply them.
If I look at the public transportation map of Berlin then the distances between places aren’t very accurate. The map isn’t designed for that purpose. That doesn’t make it a bad map and I can still mentally distinguish the territory of Berlin from the map.
You’re right, of course, motivations vary. Transit maps are not trying to model distances, just the order of stops on various lines. But motivations in some areas, like logic and physics, are much more heavily influenced by the positivists than transit maps. I think we should be paying more attention to the specific uses we have in mind when constructing any model, including logics and theories of physics, whereas model-reality epistemologies make us think only of mirroring reality once we get to things considered more fundamental.
Of course some people are doing what I’m suggesting in “fundamental” areas. Constructivists in the foundations of math are constructing their foundations explicitly so that all math can be computable and subject to automated proof checking and theorem proving. Usually they don’t fret about whether a constructive foundation will give us the real, true picture of math. Like I’ve said, I think we should adopt that mentality everywhere.
For example there’s a commonly held belief that we shouldn’t believe two mutually contradictory models since they can’t both describe reality and at least one of them will lead us astray.
Maybe commonly held by positivists.
Not among people who really follow the “the map is not the territory”. There are many maps of the city of Berlin. I will use a different map when I want to navigate Berlin via the public transport system than when I want to drive via bike.
At the same time if my goal is staying remaining sane, it’s useful to not forget that neither of those maps are the territory of the city of Berlin. In the case of the city of Berlin few people will make the mistake of confusing the two. In other domains people do get into issues because things get complicated and they forget that their maps aren’t the territory.
But motivations in some areas, like logic and physics, are much more heavily influenced by the positivists than transit maps.
For physics that true. For biology for example it isn’t. It’s not like the positivists are the only people around.
In not sure whether you position is: “I don’t like positivism, let’s do something different” or “I don’t like positivism, let’s do X”. If it’s the second I’m not sure what X is. If it’s the first, I think that reading Science and Sanity would be helpful.
Not among people who really follow the “the map is not the territory”. There are many maps of the city of Berlin. I will use a different map when I want to navigate Berlin via the public transport system than when I want to drive via bike.
At the same time if my goal is staying remaining sane, it’s useful to not forget that neither of those maps are the territory of the city of Berlin. In the case of the city of Berlin few people will make the mistake of confusing the two. In other domains people do get into issues because things get complicated and they forget that their maps aren’t the territory.
In not sure whether you position is: “I don’t like positivism, let’s do something different” or “I don’t like positivism, let’s do X”.
I don’t think you need a “real Berlin” for that usage of maps to make sense: instead of saying that a transit map models some aspect of the real Berlin, we can say that the transit map is functional for navigating Berlin.
I’d rather this phrasing because having the concept of a real Berlin can lead to confusions when we apply the idea of by analogy to other things, like theories of arithmetic, the universe. or “the self.” That’s why I want it removed from our base epistemology. Of course I’ll be very happy to use the map and territory epistemology as a heuristic if I find it easier to think with in certain situations, but because of its shortcomings elsewhere I will not claim that it is the correct epistemology.
Hopefully that brief explanation helps answer what I am trying to do to some extent. In any case I’m thankful for both the discussion (which I’d be happy to continue, of course) and the reading suggestion.
I’d rather this phrasing because having the concept of a real Berlin can lead to confusions when we apply the idea of by analogy to other things, like theories of arithmetic, the universe.
I do think that there a real universe in the same sense that there a real Berlin. map(berlin) is not the same object as berlin just as map(universe) is not the same object as universe. Positivists want to have a state of affair where there’s no difference between map(universe) and universe. That goal doesn’t seem in reach and might even be theoretically impossible. That doesn’t mean that it’s helpful to just tell the positivists to pretend that map(universe) and universe are the same and the issue is solved.
In theory in bioinformatics different models of a phenomena have different sensitivity and specificity for a real phenomena. Depending on what you want to do you might use a model with high sensitivity or a model with high specificity. Neither of those models is more true and both aren’t the same as the real phenomena. But to have the discussion about which models is more useful to describe a certain phenomena it’s useful to have a notion of the phenomena.
In bioinformatics someone who wants to simulate 100 neurons is going to use a different model of neurons as someone who wants to simulate 10,000,000 neurons. At the same time it’s important to understand that the models are not the reality.
The Blue Brain Project claims to simulate a brain. If you want to know how much computational power is needed for “human uploading” you can’t just take the amount of computational power that the Blue Brain project uses for a single neuron. Forgetting that they are investigating a model of a neuron and not a real neuron screws you.
If we take about whether or not there’s more autism than there was 30 years ago it’s very useful to be mentally aware of what you mean with the term autism. It could be that more people are diagnosed because they changed the diagnosis criteria. It could be that more people are diagnosed because there more awareness about autism in the general public and therefore fewer cases of autism stay undiagnosed.
Of course autism doesn’t exist in the same ontological sense that a carbon atom exists. Positivism therefore doesn’t really know what to do with it. You find positivist say silly things like that thing that exist in the same sense that autism exist aren’t “real”. The positivist doesn’t want to talk about the ontology, that you need to talk about to speak meaningfully about how autism exists.
Because few people actual deal with practical ontology we have the DSM-V that defines mental illnesses in a really awful way. The committee that draw up the DSM-V didn’t go and optimized their definitions for sensitivity and specificity so that two doctors will make the same diagnosis.
I’m going to drop discussion about the universe in particular for now. Explaining why I think that the map-territory epistemology runs into problems there would require a lot of exposition on points I haven’t made yet, so it’s better suited for a post than a comment.
I’ve realised that there’s a lot more inferential distance than I thought between some of the things I said in this post and the content of other posts on LW. I’m thinking of strategies to bridge that now.
That doesn’t mean that it’s helpful to just tell the positivists to pretend that map(universe) and universe are the same and the issue is solved.
Hm, if you’re attributing that to me then I think I haven’t been nearly clear enough.
Earlier I said that I had ontological considerations but didn’t go into them in my post explicitly. I’ll outline them for you now (although I’ll be talking about them in a post in the near future, over the next couple days if I kick myself into gear properly).
In the end I’m not going to be picky about what different models claim to be real so long as they work, but in the epistemology I use to consider all of those models I’m only going to make reference to agents and their perceptual interfaces. If we consider maps and models as tools that we use to achieve goals, then we’re using them to navigate/manipulate some aspect of our experience.
We understand by trial and error that we don’t have direct control over our experiences. Often we model this lack of control by saying that there’s a real state of affairs that we don’t have perfect access to. Like I said, I think this model has limitations in areas we consider more abstract, like math, so I don’t want this included in my epistemology. Reality is a tool I can use to simplify my thinking in some situations, not something I want getting in the way in every epistemological problem I encounter.
Likewise, in your autism example, we have a model of possible failure modes that empirical research can have. This is an extremely useful tool, and a good application of the map-territory distinction, but that example still doesn’t compel me to use either of those tools in my epistemology. The more tools I commit myself to, the less stable my epistemology is. (Keeping reservationism in the back of your mind would be helpful here.)
I’m not requiring that “territory” be a coherent concept at all. Suppositions about territories are models that my epistemology evaluates rather than assumptions built into the epistemology.
If you like, you can think of this as a an ontological critique of most epistemologies. I wouldn’t like to phrase it that way, though.
What do you mean with “coherent” concept inside pragmatism? In what sense does a pragmatist worry about whether or not something is coherent?
At the moment most of what you wrote seems like a bunch of catch phrase without a look at the deeper issues. General Semantics has in addition to it’s nice slogan a bunch of thoughts about how to think.
Why? What wrong with the word ontology? I think you get into problems if you want to do ontology but refuse to think of yourself as doing ontology.
“Coherent” is a stand-in for some worries I have: Does having our epistemology underpinned by a model-reality relationship skew our motivations for creating models? Does it close certain fruitful paths by making us believe they are epistemically nonsensical or questionable? Does it have significant limitations in where it can be fruitfully applied and how? I think the answer to each is yes, which motivates me to get rid of the model-reality relationship from my core epistemology. Although of course I consider it perfectly legitimate to use that relationship as a heuristic in the context of a pragmatic background epistemology.
It’s not that I refuse. I just don’t put much stock in the distinction between epistemology and ontology. I think they’re entangled, and that pretending they aren’t leads to confusion (see the p-zombie debate, for example).
I didn’t really bring out the ontological elements of what I was doing in this post, and I recognised that afterward. I’ll fix that oversight later.
Thinking that there is a reality out there that’s separate from you model means that you can’t do magic “Law of attraction” stuff where you change the territory by changing your model. You reject a whole bunch of mysticism that presupposes that model and territory are the same.
Do you think that some of that mysticism is a fruitful path that get’s wrongly rejected?
Different people have quite different motivations for creating models. There are logical positivists who think that the only goal of a model is to represent reality as accurately as possible. That doesn’t mean that everyone who considers map and territory separate holds that extremist position.
If I look at the public transportation map of Berlin then the distances between places aren’t very accurate. The map isn’t designed for that purpose. That doesn’t make it a bad map and I can still mentally distinguish the territory of Berlin from the map.
No, but that’s because I’ve seen it in action and noted that I don’t have much use for it, and not because I’ve constructed an epistemology that proscribes it altogether.
I don’t see the point of barring paths as inherently epistemically irrational. I would rather let anyone judge for themselves which tools would be appropriate or inappropriate, and model the success or failures in whichever way helps them choose tools more effectively later.
For example there’s a commonly held belief that we shouldn’t believe two mutually contradictory models since they can’t both describe reality and at least one of them will lead us astray. In other words it isn’t epistemically rational to believe both. I want to scrap judgements like that from the underpinnings of our epistemology, because that really does close fruitful paths. During revolutions in physics, after one theory gains a slight advantage the competitors all die out. I would like to see more of a plurality, so that we can have multiple tools in our arsenal with different potential uses. Rather than deciding that I can believe only one, I’ll say that I can use any to the extent that they work, and I will hold beliefs about where and how I can apply them.
You’re right, of course, motivations vary. Transit maps are not trying to model distances, just the order of stops on various lines. But motivations in some areas, like logic and physics, are much more heavily influenced by the positivists than transit maps. I think we should be paying more attention to the specific uses we have in mind when constructing any model, including logics and theories of physics, whereas model-reality epistemologies make us think only of mirroring reality once we get to things considered more fundamental.
Of course some people are doing what I’m suggesting in “fundamental” areas. Constructivists in the foundations of math are constructing their foundations explicitly so that all math can be computable and subject to automated proof checking and theorem proving. Usually they don’t fret about whether a constructive foundation will give us the real, true picture of math. Like I’ve said, I think we should adopt that mentality everywhere.
Maybe commonly held by positivists.
Not among people who really follow the “the map is not the territory”. There are many maps of the city of Berlin. I will use a different map when I want to navigate Berlin via the public transport system than when I want to drive via bike.
At the same time if my goal is staying remaining sane, it’s useful to not forget that neither of those maps are the territory of the city of Berlin. In the case of the city of Berlin few people will make the mistake of confusing the two. In other domains people do get into issues because things get complicated and they forget that their maps aren’t the territory.
For physics that true. For biology for example it isn’t. It’s not like the positivists are the only people around.
In not sure whether you position is: “I don’t like positivism, let’s do something different” or “I don’t like positivism, let’s do X”. If it’s the second I’m not sure what X is. If it’s the first, I think that reading Science and Sanity would be helpful.
I don’t think you need a “real Berlin” for that usage of maps to make sense: instead of saying that a transit map models some aspect of the real Berlin, we can say that the transit map is functional for navigating Berlin.
I’d rather this phrasing because having the concept of a real Berlin can lead to confusions when we apply the idea of by analogy to other things, like theories of arithmetic, the universe. or “the self.” That’s why I want it removed from our base epistemology. Of course I’ll be very happy to use the map and territory epistemology as a heuristic if I find it easier to think with in certain situations, but because of its shortcomings elsewhere I will not claim that it is the correct epistemology.
Hopefully that brief explanation helps answer what I am trying to do to some extent. In any case I’m thankful for both the discussion (which I’d be happy to continue, of course) and the reading suggestion.
I do think that there a real universe in the same sense that there a real Berlin. map(berlin) is not the same object as berlin just as map(universe) is not the same object as universe. Positivists want to have a state of affair where there’s no difference between map(universe) and universe. That goal doesn’t seem in reach and might even be theoretically impossible. That doesn’t mean that it’s helpful to just tell the positivists to pretend that map(universe) and universe are the same and the issue is solved.
In theory in bioinformatics different models of a phenomena have different sensitivity and specificity for a real phenomena. Depending on what you want to do you might use a model with high sensitivity or a model with high specificity. Neither of those models is more true and both aren’t the same as the real phenomena. But to have the discussion about which models is more useful to describe a certain phenomena it’s useful to have a notion of the phenomena.
In bioinformatics someone who wants to simulate 100 neurons is going to use a different model of neurons as someone who wants to simulate 10,000,000 neurons. At the same time it’s important to understand that the models are not the reality. The Blue Brain Project claims to simulate a brain. If you want to know how much computational power is needed for “human uploading” you can’t just take the amount of computational power that the Blue Brain project uses for a single neuron. Forgetting that they are investigating a model of a neuron and not a real neuron screws you.
If we take about whether or not there’s more autism than there was 30 years ago it’s very useful to be mentally aware of what you mean with the term autism. It could be that more people are diagnosed because they changed the diagnosis criteria. It could be that more people are diagnosed because there more awareness about autism in the general public and therefore fewer cases of autism stay undiagnosed.
Of course autism doesn’t exist in the same ontological sense that a carbon atom exists. Positivism therefore doesn’t really know what to do with it. You find positivist say silly things like that thing that exist in the same sense that autism exist aren’t “real”. The positivist doesn’t want to talk about the ontology, that you need to talk about to speak meaningfully about how autism exists.
Because few people actual deal with practical ontology we have the DSM-V that defines mental illnesses in a really awful way. The committee that draw up the DSM-V didn’t go and optimized their definitions for sensitivity and specificity so that two doctors will make the same diagnosis.
I’m going to drop discussion about the universe in particular for now. Explaining why I think that the map-territory epistemology runs into problems there would require a lot of exposition on points I haven’t made yet, so it’s better suited for a post than a comment.
I’ve realised that there’s a lot more inferential distance than I thought between some of the things I said in this post and the content of other posts on LW. I’m thinking of strategies to bridge that now.
Hm, if you’re attributing that to me then I think I haven’t been nearly clear enough.
Earlier I said that I had ontological considerations but didn’t go into them in my post explicitly. I’ll outline them for you now (although I’ll be talking about them in a post in the near future, over the next couple days if I kick myself into gear properly).
In the end I’m not going to be picky about what different models claim to be real so long as they work, but in the epistemology I use to consider all of those models I’m only going to make reference to agents and their perceptual interfaces. If we consider maps and models as tools that we use to achieve goals, then we’re using them to navigate/manipulate some aspect of our experience.
We understand by trial and error that we don’t have direct control over our experiences. Often we model this lack of control by saying that there’s a real state of affairs that we don’t have perfect access to. Like I said, I think this model has limitations in areas we consider more abstract, like math, so I don’t want this included in my epistemology. Reality is a tool I can use to simplify my thinking in some situations, not something I want getting in the way in every epistemological problem I encounter.
Likewise, in your autism example, we have a model of possible failure modes that empirical research can have. This is an extremely useful tool, and a good application of the map-territory distinction, but that example still doesn’t compel me to use either of those tools in my epistemology. The more tools I commit myself to, the less stable my epistemology is. (Keeping reservationism in the back of your mind would be helpful here.)