The men and women of science beg the question of bivalence, assume the point at issue, climb the ladder of bivalence and forget they stand on it. The practice looks far more like religion than science. They turn their assumption of bivalence into an entrance exam and fail those who dissent, and they banish them with all the intimidation modern science can marshal: sloppy reasoning, not rigorous enough, unscientific measurement, untrained eye, poor experimental design, won’t fit in a computer, commonsensical, folk psychology, would know better if you knew more math.
I had lost my faith in establishment science and found myself in a type of reverse atheism. I had passed the bivalent entrance exams but in my heart and head still failed them. I learned how to apply the rules of science but did not believe they were true.
...
I looked for an alternative that could challenge bivalent science on its own terms. If science rests on math, so should the alternative. Criticism fails without a working alternative. Fuzzy logic provided that alternative. It had the same math flavor that probability had, it worked with percentages between 0% and 100%, but it described events happening to some degree, not whether “random” events happened all or none.
--Fuzzy Thinking, Bart Kosko, Dr. Kosko is an EE Professor, IEEE Fellow, and Professor of Law
https://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/profile_1.html
I had lost my faith in establishment science and found myself in a type of reverse atheism. I had passed the bivalent entrance exams but in my heart and head still failed them. I learned how to apply the rules of science but did not believe they were true.
...
I looked for an alternative that could challenge bivalent science on its own terms. If science rests on math, so should the alternative. Criticism fails without a working alternative. Fuzzy logic provided that alternative. It had the same math flavor that probability had, it worked with percentages between 0% and 100%, but it described events happening to some degree, not whether “random” events happened all or none.
--Fuzzy Thinking, Bart Kosko, Dr. Kosko is an EE Professor, IEEE Fellow, and Professor of Law
https://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/profile_1.html
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;-)
"It depends" is an expression for context: complex: "relative"-)
It is complex, "it depends"-)
"It depends" is an expression for context: complex: "relative"-)
It is complex, "it depends"-)
@mark4w wrote, “Scientists didn't necessarily say things are simple, but they often did say things like we do know this, we don't know that. They didn't usually say we maybe know 40% about some particular thing. Some of them could have sometimes, but in an argument usually the verify-abilty principle and bivalence would win (e.g. "you have insufficient proof of that" or "a lion is not a tiger" type of thinking)”
Hi Bill,
I get what Kosko is talking about. If you look for it, its there to see.
If you first look for reasons to discount/dismiss it, then you will never comprehend his point. At least Spinoza had a conjecture to that effect:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/adams-maxim-and-spinozas-conjecture-mar-08/#:~:text=“Several psychological studies appear to,collaborators on the study in
“Several psychological studies appear to support [17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict] Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection,” report Harris and his collaborators on the study in their paper, published in the December 2007 Annals of Neurology. “Understanding a proposition may be analogous to perceiving an object in physical space: We seem to accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise.” So subjects assessed true statements as believable faster than they judged them as unbelievable or undecidable. Further, because the brain appears to process false or uncertain statements in regions linked to pain and disgust, especially in judging tastes and odors, this study gives new meaning to a claim passing the “taste test” or the “smell test.”
EDIT: Or maybe its that you are parsing every sentence to see if there is any logical exception to it being true, and thus finding some reason to give a sentence a bivalent judgment of false?
I get what Kosko is talking about. If you look for it, its there to see.
If you first look for reasons to discount/dismiss it, then you will never comprehend his point. At least Spinoza had a conjecture to that effect:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/adams-maxim-and-spinozas-conjecture-mar-08/#:~:text=“Several psychological studies appear to,collaborators on the study in
“Several psychological studies appear to support [17th-century Dutch philosopher Benedict] Spinoza’s conjecture that the mere comprehension of a statement entails the tacit acceptance of its being true, whereas disbelief requires a subsequent process of rejection,” report Harris and his collaborators on the study in their paper, published in the December 2007 Annals of Neurology. “Understanding a proposition may be analogous to perceiving an object in physical space: We seem to accept appearances as reality until they prove otherwise.” So subjects assessed true statements as believable faster than they judged them as unbelievable or undecidable. Further, because the brain appears to process false or uncertain statements in regions linked to pain and disgust, especially in judging tastes and odors, this study gives new meaning to a claim passing the “taste test” or the “smell test.”
EDIT: Or maybe its that you are parsing every sentence to see if there is any logical exception to it being true, and thus finding some reason to give a sentence a bivalent judgment of false?
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Yet the square root of -1 ("j") can follow the rules of mathematics and give us repeatable and useful answers. You can plug a complex number into an algebraic equation and get real world results.
I exaggerated. It may not be the “strongest” or “definite”, but it is a significant factor.
The work of Leon Festinger is the reference in that domain.
“The Fox and the Grapes” is one illustration of it.
A more amusing example is this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seekers_(rapturists)
This blog post also covers some ground:
http://freelancemd.com/blog/2011/2/25/pricing-cognitive-dissonance-how-to-charge-more.html
That’s the best analogue to “fuzzy logic”. The one our teacher used in class actually.
Now all that is needed is the distinction concept and object.
What seems to be feasible in a concept, mathematics, does not have to be feasible in physics;-)
What seems to be feasible in a concept, mathematics, does not have to be feasible in physics;-)
I am familiar with his work. He did a famous paper on Social Comparison too.
Do you also follow modern Cognitive Psychology?
How about Gilbert's paper below...
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Again, math is not the same thing as the physical world. Math is a set of rules and symbols. The physical world is not so cut and dried.
Hold an apple in your hand. Is it an apple? Yes. The object in your hand belongs to the clumps of space-time we call the set of apples—all apples anywhere ever. Now take a bite, chew it, swallow it. Let your digestive tract take apart the apple’s molecules. Is the object in your hand still an apple? Yes or no? Take another bite. Is the new object still an apple? Take another bite, and so on down to void.
The apple changes from thing to nonthing, to nothing. But where does it cross the line from apple to nonapple?
Fuzzy Thinking, Bart Kosko
Just found a reference that the senses work one at a time from U.S. National Institutes of Healt (although the topic is Synesthesia).
Closing your eyes for a better listening experience seems to have a scientific explanation.
On the opposite side I had already noticed that muting audio off during the vision of a film made me immediately realize the pretense of the actors and the fiction of the scene, just as a non-mediated vision, not "disturbed" by music or dialogue.
https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2019/05/mingling-senses
Just few hours ago I really wondered if in any possible way this thread, or rather the great amount of opinions [and Ego(s)] contained within this thread, could somehow contribute to improving the sound of even one single amplifier only.
I would still have considered it a (great) success.
Because what matters, in my opinion, is the impact that a scientific fact brings or does not bring to the product that the "average" buyer is interested in buying.
I then thought it might even make it worse though. 🙂
But since I'm an inveterate optimist I immediately told myself that it wasn't possible to make things any even worse... 😀
Edit to add: @ElArte
I would still have considered it a (great) success.
Because what matters, in my opinion, is the impact that a scientific fact brings or does not bring to the product that the "average" buyer is interested in buying.
I then thought it might even make it worse though. 🙂
But since I'm an inveterate optimist I immediately told myself that it wasn't possible to make things any even worse... 😀
Edit to add: @ElArte
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Cupping your hands behind your ears leads to a better listening experience, too, at least in some cases, with regards to certain characteristics. Work well if the volume is low.
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Psilocybe cyanescens too.
Don't do drugs, people, don't do it. It may improve your experience of music, but it will eventually kill you.
Don't do drugs, people, don't do it. It may improve your experience of music, but it will eventually kill you.
About 5% of the physical things we want to model mathematically fit into the above mold. The other 95% is chaos/complexity theory. I guess the mathematical equivalent to fuzzy logic, something that i first ran into in Uni in the 70s.
dave
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