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Sunday, December 04, 2005

 

 The BCNGroup Beadgames

National Project à 

Challenge Problem  à

 Center of Excellence Proposal à

[bead thread on curriculum reform]

 

 

The Taos Institute

(on the possibilities)

 

 

Communication from John Sowa,

 

Original Message -------- Subject: The possibility of a universal framework Date: Sun, 04 Dec 2005 10:53:51 -0500 From: John F. Sowa  To: ONTAC-WG General Discussion <ontac-forum@colab.cim3.net>

 

I received an offline note related to some of this discussion.  Following is my response with the feature that the identify of the sender deleted.

 

John Sowa

 

Note to sender,

 

<quote>

I am firmly convinced that it is in principle impossible to have a single, ideal, universal framework of any kind that is also formal and precise.  Such a system would be far too rigid and inflexible to serve as a foundation for knowledge representation for science, engineering, business, and everyday life.

 

This does not mean that we cannot have formal ontologies, but merely that we cannot have a single, monolithic ontology that is fixed and precisely formalized from top to bottom. We might have multiple ontologies or a framework that allows modules to be replaced or modified, but the idea of a single monolith is doomed.

 

On the other hand, I also believe that *every* natural language is capable of being extended by means of metaphors and related techniques to be a universal *informal* system.

 

Note the distinction:

 

  1. No precise formal system can ever be universal.

 

  2. But every natural language embodies sufficient resources to serve as a universal informal system that can be extended and modified by metaphorical means to cover everything that is humanly conceivable.

 

I strongly disagree with the following:

 

“Although her doctoral supervisors ... applaud her

exploration of "the nature of human language by using

the experimental scientific method," they do not see 

her research as something useful for exact sciences 

and technology.”

 

On the contrary, the fundamental methods of doing creative research in science and technology *always* involve breaking out of any rigid formalized system.  Every creative advance introduces new meanings that are totally foreign to the framework that had been precisely defined beforehand.  You can have trivial innovations that reshuffle the old ideas, but a creative advance must, of necessity, break the mold.

 

Just look at Einstein's papers of 1905 -- which destroyed the foundations of classical physics.  If Einstein had limited his thinking to just those concepts that had been formalized up to 1904, it would have been impossible for him to think those new thoughts or to express them in a formal language that had previously been defined.

 

Every creative advance in science *and* engineering destroys some previous formalism and introduces a totally new framework. That means that if science were restricted to only those concepts that had been formalized at some point in time, *all* of science and technology would be frozen at that instant, and no further advance would be *conceivable*.

 

Note the word "conceivable".  If you freeze the language, you freeze thought.  George Orwell understood that principle very well -- read his book _1984_, especially his discussion of Newspeak as the intended replacement for English.

 

These points don't imply that formalism is bad.  It's necessary for any kind of computer programming.  But as soon as you have formalized something for version 1.0 of your program, you can be certain that at least part of it will be contradicted by something in version 1.1.  And by the time you get to v. 2.0, you will have to rewrite the whole theory that you formalized for v. 1.0.

 

John Sowa