[KB] Incomplete Nature

Sat Aug 9 15:03:15 EDT 2014

I mis-posted again (face palm:)

This is a copy with a few middling edits.

 Thank you Mr. Simons and sorry for sending this to you twice. I
 was trying to infer the meanings from parsing the terms, and
 I foolishly forgot our friend Google.

 Ms Cox, perhaps you can chime if I touch upon your interest. If I had time now I would like to
 think through those terms. Might be easier to read through a
 thread. But, I need to get to the root, as I see it, rather
 than the branches.

 Seeing as some have delved-into/are-familiar with 'theories of explanation' i
 put down the proposition that Explanations necessarily refer
 to Intuitions or Axioms. That is a first point. If accepted,
 the next is that both can be wrong, so we need to examine
 them and on and on, the anti-foundationalist arg is one way
 to name it. It relates to the 'bundle theory' of ontology. 
 I strongly suspect you know these arguments
 but I wonder if I should develop them... or move on, or give a
 list of topics, which converge on the core subject, in
 preview. If I lay things down too baldly my task may appear
 more disjointed than it must.

 Let's go for a moment to N Cusa and the
 squaring of the circle. No matter how many sides the polgon
 used to approximate the dimensions of the circle they are
 Incommensurable. He then applies the concept to the Infinite
 vrs the finite.

 Now I have
 jumped ahead, back to that later, I need to announce part of
 a prologue: 

  I might at
 times be terse, stilted, prolixicative, repetitive etc; but
 it's time to make an attempt. While no academic I am
 peripatetic (an Aristotlean pun? once the highest form of
 humour). This is a discourse, not a thesis, a prolegomena
 perhaps;

  Kepler cited
 Cusa's insight regarding the difference between the
 "Straight" and the "Curved" that while
 "an inscribed polygon grows more like a circle the more
 angles it has," "even though the multiplication of
 its angles were infinite, nothing will make the polygon
 equal the circle unless the polygon is resolved into
 identity with the circle." (On Learned Ignorance, H.
 Lawrence Bond translation, p. 91). Now we have a rather different
 schema with calculus. Cusa was a major influence on Leibnetz and
 perhaps Newton. 

 Now we need to step deeper... Man is not
 created in the image of  God; man climbed out of the slime
 through pain and death and has huge reservoirs of fear,
 terror. In compensation he forms many structures in his mind
 to avoid the associated pains (perhaps note Temple Grandin, Animals in Translation).
 That mind is the product of Living in the Flesh, not pure
 logic, it has errors and biases, some having some value, some
 history, etc, some merely adventitious. Kant (mainly through
 Cassirer for me): we don't see the world as it is. 

 One of the perennial sources
 of philosophical difficulties is not 'seeing' that
 the gene/society/civilization/human-individual contains
 ontological and epistemological filters. If one can
 conceptually merge the learning of the mammal from infant to
 adult... with the learning of the species (of the
 'blood',  the genes... Animalia as a neotenous
 expressions of 'mature' genes), of the lineage into
 the very distant past, one only has to add how society,
 language, writing, civilization merge to form a creature
 somewhat different from the idea of him which has been
 Guardedly handed down for more than a millennium.

 'The infinite in the palm
 of your hand', 'if the doors of perception were
 cleansed everything would appear as it is. Infinite'.
 This concept shows up here and there in bits of  history.
 I'm pretty sure Socrates expresses it several times (The
 Symposium for one) and it fits well with his honest opinion
 of knowing nothing. It shows up in my reading of
 Aristotle's categories and is consistent with Platos
 cave, C S Pierce's bet-a-bility ,  Cusa's Learned Ignorance  , I think Bruno ,
 Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, etc. [ please remember:
 discursive, not a thesis. that might come later but it is
 Not always a proper form]

 We tend to think of a category as
 'filled' with things. In our consciousness or at
 least formal thinking (Burkeans) we register categories as
 Big, things as small. From Aristotle's Categories we
 have a list (which I take as tentative) of kinds of
 propositions one can make about Any Thing (Burke was another with a similar  list).
 I've been through different reading of this over many years, I think
 he starts with Ousia as the Infinite Individual thing. We
 can assign abstracted qualities to categories which unite
 individual things...infinitely. (In doing so they form a new thing... a category.)
The closer we get the more such qualities appear. A thing might only have a very few
 Relevant Categories, but if we gaze deeply we can never
 fathom all it's qualities. This applies to All Things.
 We think in categories, which become our 'Mind Forged
 Manacles'

 What is a
 'thing'? Gestalt theory helps, there are others...
 network theory is very promising if one looks at the
 formation of networks/association. Space is a primal
 ground/mode, narrative another, inter alia. We have
 conceived our cosmos as rooted on primals of
 space/time/matter/energy for awhile; now we do well to focus
 on Order and the related sciences that have been emerging
 lately. Ontology is everything, every frame we may take on the nature of being.

 This is only a bare
 beginning, and it reaches into at least one epochal new tool
 (or so i am firmly persuaded).  Here I should  pause.
 --------------------------------------------
 On Sat, 8/9/14, Herbert W. Simons <hsimons at temple.edu>
 wrote:

  Subject: Re: [KB] (no
 subject)
  To: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
  Cc: "de gava" <wblakesx at yahoo.com>,
 kb at kbjournal.org
  Date: Saturday, August 9, 2014, 10:03 AM

  A

 theoretical explanation provides an answer to a why
 question
  in a thought experiment. Example:
 Gilbert Ryle asked the
  question: What's
 the difference between a wink and a

 one-eyed blink? His answer took him to the mind-brain
  distinction and could have taken KB to
 action-motion. WINKS
  ARE DONE IN ORDER TO;
 BLINKS TO BECAUSE OF.

  On Fri, Aug 8, 2014 at
  10:46 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
  wrote:

  (You
 need to click "Reply All"; otherwise it goes
  to the post's sender

  rather than to kb.)

  I'm
 interested in your somewhat cryptic message because
  on another list I am

  writing on the difference between theory on
 the one hand and
  "what needs to

  be explained" on the
 other. And involved in that is a

 differentiation

  between
 empirical generalization and theoretical

 EXPLANATION.

  Carrol

  -----Original
 Message-----

  From: kb-bounces at kbjournal.org
  [mailto:kb-bounces at kbjournal.org]
  On Behalf

 Of de gava

  Sent: Friday,
 August 08, 2014 9:34 PM

 To: kb at kbjournal.org

  Subject: [KB] (no
 subject)

  I think I can add to this
 discussion. In earlier days I
  replied to
 the

  emails I received but
 they went to Ed so to kick off I'd
  like
 to test

  kb at kbjournal.org
 as
  an address to the e-list and ask if
 anyone has looked

  closely
 into the nature of 'explanations'. More to
  follow perhaps.

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  -- 
  Herbert
 W. Simons, Ph.D.
  Emeritus Professor of
 Communication
  Dep't of  Strategic
 Communication, Weiss
  Hall 215
  Temple University, Philadelphia
  19122
  Home phone: 215 844
 5969

  http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
  Academic Fellow, Center for Transformative
  Strategic Initiatives (CTSI)

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