Re:Is There a Limit to Scientific Understanding?
by coldtea on Sunday December 10, 2017 @07:29AM
(#15891126)
>This is debatable[0]. Presumably, people without language can still think, and even if you believe that they invent an internal language to think with you are placing language into a tool-role, where it can be created and destroyed in service of a higher goal (thought).
That's a moot point, I think, as it can be argued easily that thought is a language itself, or requires one (whether it's a human language like english, or a language of symbols, or some other form of structured description of events and thoughts, even the structure just happens at the chemical level in the brain).
>Specific expressions of models are all equally good by the "correspondence" measure as well: anyone with even a grade-school math education should be able to recognize A=BCD and I=JK,K=QP as distinct in the literal sense but identical in some higher one. So, once again, it's obvious that we are looking at different ways of expressing the same thing; a thing which hasn't yet been proven not to exist, even though no way of expressing it can by itself be more than just "a different way."
It's obvious in these examples -- which, coincidentally are all from math (trigonometry, coordinate systems), that is the quintessential non-empirical/reality-based domain. It's easy to find isomorphisms like that in math, since that's inherent in their core purpose.
It's not obvious (or true) for the general case, talking about the outside world.
That's a moot point, I think, as it can be argued easily that thought is a language itself, or requires one (whether it's a human language like english, or a language of symbols, or some other form of structured description of events and thoughts, even the structure just happens at the chemical level in the brain).
>Specific expressions of models are all equally good by the "correspondence" measure as well: anyone with even a grade-school math education should be able to recognize A=BCD and I=JK,K=QP as distinct in the literal sense but identical in some higher one. So, once again, it's obvious that we are looking at different ways of expressing the same thing; a thing which hasn't yet been proven not to exist, even though no way of expressing it can by itself be more than just "a different way."
It's obvious in these examples -- which, coincidentally are all from math (trigonometry, coordinate systems), that is the quintessential non-empirical/reality-based domain. It's easy to find isomorphisms like that in math, since that's inherent in their core purpose.
It's not obvious (or true) for the general case, talking about the outside world.