Thursday, February 10, 2005

Knowledge and Paradigms, II

The below listed thought experiment can help us think about 3 problematic kinds of knowledge, where-in we experience similar kinds of problems ... our languages, natural or therwise, convey certain kinds of facts better than others. This is because of the way words refer to things. Words that refer to the relation between things hold so long as the relations hold (so long as the systems are functionally equivalent). Words that refer to things in-themselves lose their bearing and their meaning when the underlying system has changed (or may have changed).

The thought experiment was written to speak about non-natural language (logic and math) descriptions across scientific paradigm shifts.

I believe the 3 primary uses to be:
1) Cross-paradigm investigations
2) Cross-world-view investigations (What is it like to be a bat?)
3) ... and of interest in cases such as the Roman engineers mentioned below ... how do they transfer information from one to another [within a paradigm] when the ontological words of their scientific paradigm are by all standards incorrect.

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