From: fortony@sonne.cso.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: HELP - Ontology of Internet
Originator: fortony@murphy
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1992 17:04:52 GMT

jdymond@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Jason Dymond) writes:

>Perhaps I was a little vague in formulating the original question. It
>might be better phrased as:

>"What is the ontological status of the "virtual network" on which the
>transfer of data occurs, and what is the ontological status of the
>"knowledge objects" which reside thereon ?"

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.)

>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.

>	"Moreover, a book, or even a library, need not even have
>	 been written by anybody: a series of books of logarithms,
>	 for example, may be produced and printed by a computer.
>	 It may be the best series of books of logarithms - it
>	 may contain logarithms up to, say fifty decimal places.
>	 It may be sent out to libraries, but it may be found too
>	 cumbersome for use; at any rate, years may elapse before
>	 anybody uses it; and many figures in it (which represent
>	 mathematical theorems) may never be looked at as long as
>	 men live on earth. 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 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.'

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.

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.

>	Karl Popper "Knowledge: Subjective vs Objective"
-- 
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Felix Sebastian Ortony	fortony@murphy.gis.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: rec.games.mud.misc