That is a good idea - and a good subject to discuss in general: What books would the Gulch put on the bookshelf for a child?

Jan

Good to hear. I found Vol 1 of Before Writing at a used book store. All I need now is vol 2. (Also,she has a children's book on the subject: The History of Counting (Goodreads here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/93... I need that. In fact, I should find it an review it for this audience, considering that Objectivists understand how important it is to give children good cognitive development.)

Dig in and comment. There are not a lot of places where you can express a firm opinion on grammar!

Jan

Yes there is an implication of finality in the simple past vs the present perfect. 'The buying of books' is an ongoing process and as much as I am enjoying When Writing Met Art I may indeed buy more of Denise Schmandt-Besserat's books in the future. (I also have some friends who I think would enjoy them.)

I am coming down with 'what is going around' and I stayed up later than I had intended last night reading WWMA. Fascinating info and illos - wallow, wallow.

Jan

oh geez

It might have been a professor who told me verbally that "number" < "name-bearer"; and I could not find anything on it now, either. I am out of town right now and cannot do much more, but I can accept that the assertion is false. I apologize for the dead end.

I noticed that you wrote "have bought." That is a post-modern construction from urban American English ("Blinglish" or "Ebonics" unless you have a better name for it). They over-emphasis the past: "I had gone to the store." for "I went to the store." Languages change. By standard high school grammar of the 1950s, your "have bought" implies that you bought one now and perhaps will continue to buy more in the future.

I was not able to find any more info on "number" being "name bearer" - I found "num" (to sort or count) as its PIE origin. Interesting about the loan of 'seven'...one wonders what the pre-Semitic PIE word for seven was...

I have bought When Writing Met Art. I am looking forward to reading it.

Jan

Yes, I have When Writing Met Art and I recommend it highly.

For PIE and IE shatam languages are to the east and "kentum" languages were to the west.

I did not know that IE languages were special in 10, 100, 1000. I do think it interesting that they all borrowed "seven" from the Semitic.

If you know IE or PIE, then you may know that the word "number" comes from "name bearer." Naming quantities was special. The name of quantities had its own name.

I did not know that - good to note that apparently the base instinct in our human language module is 'personalized counting uniqueness' as opposed to 'abstract counting'.

I happened to be rereading a book last night on Proto-IndoEuropean linguistics and migrattions (and genetics - yum!) and the first few chapters used the PIE word for 'hundred' as an example of regressing a set of modern words to a proposed PIE root."k'mtom". As an aside, the book mentioned that PIE and its daughter languages all had words for 10, 100, 1000, etc, and so evidently used base 10 for counting.

I did not know Denise Schmandt-Besserat, but now have looked her up. Do you have When Writing Met Art? Would you recommend it?

Interesting conversation. Thank you.

Jan

Yes I think the first example I remember was one for a gimballed telescope (control system). But epicycles are a perfect historical example.

If I understand you correctly you are saying that what water IS and the sum of its observable properties are the same thing. Do you mean that what something IS is completely described by what we see when we examine it closely? If that's the case this whole discussion is just about semantics.

Yes, I was the one who pointed out that counting was limited to one... two... many until the Sumerians invented little clay tokens from which, over thousands of years, big numbers such as 4, 5, and 6 developed.

In this discussion, I put the word "natural" in quotes because it is too easy to accept ambiguously, equivocally, or colloquially. Is homosexuality natural? No more or less than Base-10. It depends on what you mean by "natural." Homosexual behavior and transgendering is found among animals. Base-10 is not. Social organization is "natural" but the Constitution of the United States is not. However, that is not to claim that the Constitution is "unnatural."

Ayn Rand said that Base-10 was "supposed" to have its origin in our digits because it was easy to accept, but she did not say "is known" or "certainly" or "must have." She was too deep and perceptive a thinker for that. In the same light, she was not sold on Darwinian evolution. Obviously, she did not believe that God did it in one day, but neither did she accept unquestioningly Darwin's uniformitarian theory of speciation.

You go to great lengths to defend the literal truth of the canonic works of Ayn Rand. I am always impressed by how integrated is your knowledge of Objectivism.

So, let me ask you: If it is natural that we use ourselves as the units of measure, why did she argue against Protagoras's "Man is the measure of all things?" She called that subjectivism.

As has been said before, the first counting began with only 2 and 3. Counting on fingers came later. Finger counting with the ten fingers led to the base 10 number system a few thousand years BC. It didn't start in 1600. Ayn Rand did not "hedge", did not write or regard the decimal system as "unnatural", "intrinsic", or "intuitive". She said what she knew and was right. I think this is all very straightforward.

This is where your philosophy has led you: in the name of what you insist is "science" you don't know what water is. There are no conflicting "models" of water preventing us from knowing what water is. There is no identityless unknowable nothing-in-particular mysteriously exhibiting "behaviors" for mental "models" and nothing to behave. Water is made of molecules which viscously flow together as an aggregate fluid as an instance of what we call "liquid". A liquid is in contrast to molecular structures forming other states such as a solid. See for example Batchelor, An Introduction to Fluid Mechanics. Mechanically constrain it and the flow or motion is different. Freeze or boil the water and the high temperature causes the molecules to more tightly bond or separate into a solid or gas. Both the molecular and macroscopic states and properties are characteristics of water. It is the sum of all its characteristics. It is not an unknowable thing with incompatible behaviors stuck to a core with no identity, with a parallel disintegrated collection of free-floating conflicting mental models in the Kantian phenomenal world cut off from the real one. The characteristics do not contradict each other. Some of them explain others in the scientific theory conceptually integrating facts as knowledge of the world. When you know its characteristics distinguishing it from other liquids and states of matter you know what it is.

A common error is believing that subatomic "particles" like electrons must be either entities or wave motion in a medium like we experience them on the macroscopic, perceptual level. We cannot prescribe what reality must be. The fact is that in the quantum mechanical realm things have characteristics of both wave and particle properties under different circumstances, as experimentally verified since the beginning of quantum physics. See Bruce Wheaton's very interesting The Tiger and the Shark: The Empirical Roots of Wave-Particle Dualism covering the first 30 years of the science.

If we think everything in that realm must be either a "particle" or a "wave" as known in the macroscopic world, then we have a contradiction. But if you recognize that in new realms outside our perception they need not be like what we experience in the macroscopic world, and that a thing is the totality of its characteristics, then there is no contradiction as long as it is not something and its opposite in the same respect at the same time, which has not and cannot occur. There is no clash with the law of identity or non-contradiction -- unless we create a false one by trying to dictate what reality must be.

It is a statement about your repetitious posts preaching bad conventional philosophy in the name of "science" in threads on this forum about Ayn Rand's epistemology. You have done this ranging from denials that one can rationally understand "what is it" to undermining simple statements of certainty that 2+2 is 4 to claiming that consciousness changes reality just by knowing. You don't discuss the topics, you just counter with the same speeches undermining certainty and understanding in the name of what you claim is science, as if that is all that needs to be said to justify the conventional cognitively nihilistic Kantian-inspired dogmas.

Changing the topic to how experiments are designed and conducted, as you wrap yourself in the virtue of experiment and condescendingly write off anyone else as opposed to it, is not a defense of your philosophical pronouncements. It's a bad package deal. My understanding of science, mathematics and engineering, which is considerable, is not your philosophy.

An engineering model such as a wind tunnel, a circuit, or a computational computer model (or simplified hand calculation) is, like a map depicting only certain features regarded as essential for a particular purpose, worthless without conceptual understanding of its meaning and limitations in accordance with principles of science and engineering. It is not the "model" mentality in theoretical physics, which elevates the fallacy of the stolen concept to the grand larceny of knowledge as such with Kantian subjectivism.

When someone tells you that something is true in your engineering model but not for the actual device you know what that means. But now consider what it means for the "model" mentality to tell you that something you say is "only true in your model", with actual "truth" meaning whatever "works" for someone's subjective purpose in a world that cannot be known as it is "really is". It's the shear evil of Kantianism.

I have not jumped from perception to concepts without understanding the process. The whole book that is the subject of this thread is about how concepts are formed -- not just first level concepts from perception, but the crucial process of forming higher level concepts in a hierarchy of abstractions from abstractions that are necessary for conceptual knowledge, especially science. Those who have read the book can discuss it here, but it can't be repeated in a post.

It is not about so-called 'perfect knowledge' by the false standard of omniscience. Knowledge is contextual and objective, not intrinsic or subjective.

More fundamental than the process of concept formation itself is the principle of knowledge as understanding of reality versus Kantian subjectivism holding that our mental processing is about a phenomenal world locked in our heads, not an understanding of the world that is declared to be unknowable. That is what Pragmatism and Positivism came from and is what the "model" mentality is: mental images locked in our heads struggling to be in parallel with an unknowable reality in some "pragmatic" way that is "useful".

The form this took in philosophy of science, "Operationalism", has spread everywhere. It has the gall to claim a monopoly on experiment and evidence, as if any other epistemology must by meaningless "metaphysics". In that it is a combination of Hume's radical empiricism of knowledge without concepts versus the Rationalists concepts without reality, synthesized into Kant. When you read that the meaning and definition of a concept in physics is "how you measure it" -- such as "there is no such thing as an electron, only ammeters" and that you only have an electron "model" in your head -- that is Operationalism.

The notion of cognitive methods as "tools" that "work", without concepts and principles, with meaning as "whatever works" "open" to change to anything, and truth as "what is true today may not be tomorrow", is full-blown Pragmatism.

Listen to Leonard Peikoff's lecture series on the history of philosophy, noting especially for this topic how it resulted in Kant, Positivism and Pragmatism. For Ayn Rand's alternative in epistemology listen to his lecture series on Objectivism and read Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (for the theory of concepts) and the first five chapters of Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (for the broader metaphysics and epistemology). The appendix to IOE on Ayn Rand's workshops on epistemology includes a section discussing implications for philosophy of science, but that is not the place to start.

You are right. It was my mistake. She wrote, "... which is supposed to have its origin..." Supposed, not probable, was the hedge.

I cited the best expert on the origins of writing. Literacy developed out of numeracy. Counting came first. And it did not begin on fingers.

Read IOE and listen to the Peikoff lectures on the history of philosophy and Objectivism to see the contrast with Kant, Positivism, and Pragmatism. It's not a matter of semantics and neither is the widespread indoctrination of the bad philosophy that has infiltrated the culture and the philosophy of science for a century, all dogmatically promoted with rote slogans in the name of science.

There is a lot on the concept of units and how and why things are regarded as units for different purposes in IOE, including extensive additional discussion in the appendix on the workshops.

You wrote: "Rand equivocates with '... which is supposed to have its origin...' She may have known that that decimal system is not 'natural'." Now you say "Of course Base-10 is 'natural'." You contradicted yourself, and now add that "everything real is natural". What does it mean to say base 10 numbers are "real"? It is a method, not a part of physical reality. You brought up the notions of the decimal system being "natural" or "unnatural", not Ayn Rand or anyone else.

She did not use the terms 'natural' or 'probable' at all, nor did she or anyone in this discussion use the terms "intrinsic" or "intuitive". There is no "implicit fallacy" there for you to "get past".

And Ayn Rand did not equivocate: She did not "obviously have an insight about the inherent problem of how numbering came about." She used it as an example of man relating early measurement to himself in a perfectly good brief discussion of how measurement and concepts are the means of extending knowledge beyond the perceptual level.

The decimal system did in fact arise out of 10 fingers on a hand. Your claim that it was proposed in 1600 is not true. There is a long history of finger counting in 10s going back thousands of years BC. Ayn Rand did not say that the full modern mathematical formulation sprung out of primitives in their first counting, nor was that necessary to count in tens as the historical origins of what became the decimal system as opposed to some other numerical base.

I don't accept much of anything that Popper said, but I'm an engineer.

ewv; I think I get what you're arguing for, but it strikes me that you're jumping from a percept to a concept without trying to understand or include the process in between. I agree that many theoretical scientists take their 'models' beyond the necessary limits and constraints. But I think that the 'modeling' or theorizing to develop what can be applied to an experiment and measurement is an extremely important part of getting to concept and integration.

Without that step, I doubt we would have progressed in our understanding and knowledge of our Universe, much less our environmental reality.

Those thoughts are not Kantian, nor do they represent 'floating abstractions with terminology "stolen" from Objectivism'. Maybe we're discussing more the definition of 'knowledge' and how we obtain or integrate it, or the limits of what our knowledge can be at a certain point in time or development.

Are we seeking perfect knowledge similar to db's example of perfect competition in economics or are we seeking knowledge of reality through the best tools we know at this point understanding constraints and limitations and open to additions or subtractions as the process is carried out?

Dale, I understand that perfectly. The ability to analyze the output against the input and from that to develop an explanation of what was occurring in that component of the control system without actually seeing the internals. And we all understood, or we should have, that it was 'only a model', maybe just an approximation; but it allowed us to progress, within limits, without having to stop at the 'black box' before we could understand, predict, and utilize the entire system. Any able engineer has learned that concept, particularly in control system applications, and I understand and agree that some theoretical scientist, particularly in physics and politics and social science (vodoo), have not and don't fully grasp the limits or constraints of 'models'. Reminds me a little bit of your 'perfect competition' example in economic analysis.

Properly understood, constrained, and limited models are necessary to proper development of concepts and the progress of science.