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Date:         Sun, 3 Jan 1993 15:13:31 MET
From:         Maler <maler@IMAG.FR>
Subject:      Re: Misc catching up
              catching up" (Dec 29, 22:20)

[From Oded Maler 930103]
*
* [From Bill Powers (921229.2100)}
*
* -------------------------------------------------------------
* Oded Maler (921229) --
*
*
* >Each community has its own system of rewards and
* >encouragements, whether it is the church of established Science
* >or the cult of enlightened PCTers.
*
* I don't like that comment.

I Forgot some non-grown-ups are in the background :-)

* What's wrong with established Science
* is the establishment part, not the science part.

Maybe my use of the term "cult" is not appropriate. You can decompose
both established and non-stablished science into their "scientific"
part (some ideal objective of increasing human knowledge concerning
the world [if the latter exists..]) and their social/administrative/
organizational part which is the description of how this goal is
implemented, successfully or not, by interconnecting human beings with
their local motivations to form a scientific community. My observation
was that analogically to religion, established science is more like
the Church, while PCT is more like, say, the first christians or a
nomad empire. This was said with no regard to the "science" part of
both. In maintaining the integrity of some non-established group of
people you need some substitute for tenures/grants/publications, and
this is done by promising some share in the kingdom-of-heaven and
scientific-truth and other forms of positive reinforcement (I know
there is not such a thing, but I could not find a better term).

* I think we PCT
* types go farther than most in sticking to the science and
* avoiding becoming an establishment. It's only people who don't
* ever do any experiments with real people who think that PCT is
* just another belief system handed down from on high. The basis of
* PCT is a set of easily reproducible phenomena that conventional
* science has overlooked. To show that PCT doesn't follow from
* these phenomena, you'd have to upset everything the physical
* sciences have developed over the last 350 years or so. I don't
* think that a system with such a strong base in phenomena deserves
* the term "cult."

I think what I said above clarifies my personal meaning of the term.
Anyway, I don't want to sweep the dicussion to my favorite level,
the meta-level. Not everything should be said explicitly.

About the mathematics behind object perception and recognition.  I
don't have nything productive to say for the moment. I'll think and
ask some authorities. Meanwhile I think you might find some
inspiration in the books of the great mathematician H. Weyl which are
probably accessible. He was concerned with the relation between the
world and its perception/representation and he conceived abstract
algebra as playing a fundamental role in this process of
'coordinatisation'.


--Oded

--
===============================================================
Oded Maler, LGI-IMAG (Campus), B.P. 53x, 38041 Grenoble, France
Phone:  76635846  Fax: 76446675   e-mail: maler@vercors.imag.fr
===============================================================
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