From: jdymond@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Jason Dymond)
Subject: Re: HELP - Ontology of Internet
Organization: University of Western Australia
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 04:54:22 GMT

fortony@sonne.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
: 
: You're presupposing again with this "virtual network" business; the
: actual transfer of data occurs over a very real network (in my case,
: a serial device attached to an RS-232 port attached to a 80386 CPU
: attached to another RS-232 port attached to a modular-demodulator
: attached to a phone line attached to my wall attached to a trunk
: phone line attached to various phone company devices attached to
: another trunk line attached to a wall attached to a large terminal
: server attached to a FDDI backbone attached to a router box attached
: to an ethernet segment attached to a sun3/60 ethernet board attached
: to a CPU.  From there, even more black magic occurs which gets my
: little characters onto your fine screen.)
:
My (admittedly somewhat incomplete) understanding of TCP/IP is that the
Internetwork is to be understood as a virtual network, insofar as users
on one network interface transparently (to the user) with another
network via internet. ie when we log on to a remote host, it is just as
if (from the users POV), we are logged onto our home network. That is
where the "virtual network" presupposition arises.

 
: >What I am getting at is the ontological status of the objects of Karl
: >Poppers "World 3".
: 
: well SHEESH!  A GUY COULD HAVE SAID SO IN THE FIRST PLACE.
:
[stuff deleted] 
: >	                     Yet each of these figures contains
: >	 what I call "objective knowledge"; and the question of
: >	 whether or not I am entitled to call it by this name is
: >	 of no interest."
: 
: i.e. "I say this is so and invite no argument, thus invalidating 
: the passage previous."
: 
: Popper is unfortunately spouting what I consider to be crap here.
: Epistemologically speaking, the books he describes contain almost
: nothing -- if a zulu native picks them up, he might find the glyphs
: to be aesthetically pleasing, but he is gaining no knowledge.
: Knowledge requires a knower familiar with the context.

To use Poppers biological example, you are saying that a wasps nest is
no longer a wasps nest after the wasps have left it, and if it is never
again inhabited by wasps. I would suggest that you would still call such
a thing a wasps nest. Consider also, a long dead language - linear A or
linear B - do you think that it has no semantic content just because no
one alive is able to understand it. What happens when it is "cracked",
and we have access to the content ?

: To pull an example from Lehrer, who is pulling it from someone else
: (Chisholm?), let's say you're standing on a broad plain and you see
: a little fuzzy thing down about a mile away.  "That is a sheep," you
: say.  Well, it's *really* a big fluffy dog.  Now, you don't *know*
: that's a sheep, because it so happens that you're wrong, that your
: senses have proven inadequate.  You also don't *know* that it's a dog,
: because you *believe* that it's a sheep.  Even though your belief
: is justified and coherent, it's not true.  In the same way as this
: example, the book contains stuff which only a qualified viewer with
: all sorts of knowledge derivation tools can hope to use.  The knowledge
: in the book is more correctly placed in the viewer, 'waiting to happen.'

What is happening here is just the evolution of knowledge as per Poppers
schema:

	P1 -> TT -> EE -> P2
where:
	P1 = starting problem  ie "what is that fuzzy thing on the
				   horizon ?"
	TT = tentative theory ie "That is a sheep"
	EE = error elimination. ie move closer to the object
	P2 = Problem 2 ie "It's not a sheep, so what is it"
nb. P2 doesn't necessarily have to equal P1 it just does in this case.
 
: To define knowledge as possibly-objective is to miss the entire point
: of epistemology and end up saying something meaningless.  By the token
: Popper provides, this bottle of Tropical Fruit Gatorade Thirst Quencher
: I grasp in my right hand is a tract on semiotic reasoning just waiting
: for the right person to come along and extract knowledge from it.  Clearly,
: providing this sort of categorization is completely worthless.
: 
The preoccupation with *meaning* is just what Popper is suggesting is
the problem with philosophy. The problems of the meanings of words are
unimportant. Rather it is theories and their truth that are important.
words are just the means of fromulating theories. 

: I recommend that you drop the book on Popper and go read something
: about semiotics, which, despite being a french philosophy, seems to have
: gotten this issue right.  I'd recommend Lehrer, but, from page 149:
: 
: "D12.  A system M is a member of the ultrasystem of S at t if and only
: if either M is the acceptance system of S at t or results from eliminating
: one or more statements of the form, 'S accepts that q,' when q is false,
: replacing one or more of the statements of the form, 'S accepts that q,'
: with a statement of the form, 'S accepts that not q,' when q is false,
: or any combination of such eliminations and replacements in the acceptance
: system of S at t with the constraint that if q logically entails r which
: is false and also accepted, then 'S accepts that r' must also be eliminated
: or replaced just as 'S accepts that q' was."  (Lehrer, _Theory of Knowledge_)
: 
: which makes a great .signature but not good light reading.
:
More on this bit of Lehrer later :)

Jason.
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.misc