TOTALLY. And the kids shows always say "Cookie starts with C!" instead of "The word that we use to refer to cookies starts with C." What-up, idiots?
Yeah! WHERE'S MY ROYALTIES, DAMN YOUR HIDES?!
You know what I don't like? Rust.
You know what I don't like? Unemployment.
When my phone powers up, the word 'droid' appears and a robot voice says "droid." I've started getting Droid Magazine. Model number is Droid2.
Those kids at Motorola.
Is not the Motorola Droid a model of phone that runs the Android operating system?
Pwned. Don't care.
8: Yes! But not all Android-based devices are Droids, FFS!!!!one!1!
9: oh. That's true. People should talk about their HTc Bloatroad or Amazon Fondlebook or whatever.
On the other hand, making people unhappy seems to be a strong secondary goal of Android handsets, so maybe this is all part of the plan.
Was at the local offices of that company , and was amused to see that on an end table in the "library" were half-a-dozen copies of the recently-published fifth volume of a fantasy series discussed here not too long ago. Also this (Authors series). Also discovered all three of my son's roommates were avid fans from before the HBO series. I guess it was and is a thing to larger extent than I had realized.
making people unhappy seems to be a strong secondary goal of Android handsets the computer industry
Or maybe I'm just bitter that there is no platform (either mobile or desktop) that meets all my requirements.
Who cares?
Pretty much no one, I'm guessing, except me and a handful of lawyers at Verizon and Motorola.
there is no platform [...] that meets all my requirements
And here I took you for more of a flats guy. Sneakers, maybe.
1: INTERPRETIVE CHARITY FAIL. THEY ARE SAYING "'COOKIE' STARTS WITH 'C'"!
13: If you just put together the appropriate RfP, I'm sure someone will bid on it. We'll call it joshr, or iNrg.
Quine's been hanging out with Davidson, I see.
12: Oh, if you're the sort of person who reads that sort of thing, the GRRM books have been huge for a while. Combination of starting out strong, and then the maddening wait for more installments, has gotten people really powerfully engaged.
18: Quite.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
18: Although in fairness I did not know that "interpretive charity" was also a Quine thing until you make me look it up on Wikipedia.
19: Speaking of books, has anyone 'round these parts read The Hunger Games? It's been recommended to me, but I'm not sure I trust the recommendation.
I liked the first one a lot, the second one a fair amount, and the third one middlingly. Overall, though, I found reading them to be a good way to spend time.
23 to 22, although I see now that Stanley only mentioned the first book (The Hunger Games) which I treated as a reference to the whole trilogy.
22: Read them all, as did my daughter. The first one is fast and exciting, the second two I was less into. They're definitely YA reads -- the dystopian future makes no actual sense -- but good of their kind. Megan liked them a lot.
I believe that you have to be at least 30 years old before we should take your irritation seriously.
19: Was just a bit surprised as someone who might well "read that sort of thing" but generally doesn't*, how far off my radar it was.
*And now he has me. I'll probably watch that hour-long talk when I get home since I apparently have not devoted enough hours of my life to it in the last few months.
Yea, Ive spent a lot of time reading the first four books.
26: I'm totes gonna call you in February.
It's okay when it's in reference to the Motorola Droid, which runs Android, right? Especially if it's the R2D2 edition Droid? Right?
Do people do that. I have literally never heard someone use "droid" to meam "Amdroid phone". Then again, I haven't heard anyone use "Droid" to mean a Droid phone, because they're shitty handsets no sane person would use. HTC for the win.
||
Does anyone here live in Atlanta?
What about Tampa? Birmingham? Chattanooga?
|>
The Atlanta MSA has 5,268,860 people in it. Isn't it more or less statistically impossible for no one here to live in Atlanta?
Maybe you should allow more than seven minutes for a reply, dude.
And the Tampa MSA is 4,228,855! That's nearly 10 million people, together with Atlanta. That's definitely statistically impossible.
Statistically improbable, not impossible.
Also, I have no idea how many people read a given comment thread. Based on the number of commenters, the three percent of the US population represented by those areas would not be that unlikely to have no readers of any given thread.
Is it possible that half of Unfogged is on the take from HTC? It would certainly have been effective advertising if so. So subtle!
We are, of course, a statistically representative slice of America (or even -- the world?).
38: how many active commenters are you assuming there are? I was using 1,000 as a rough estimate.
They don't have any universities down there, so it's much less likely.
Well, shit. Where am I supposed to sleep?
You can stay here, urple. Might make for a long morning commute, though.
39: Statistically, I have an HTC phone.
Would you like to stay with my dear friend who just got dumped and doesn't know about Unfogged?
I don't see how you could have travel plans where Florida or Tennessee will work for a place to stay.
I don't need a place to stay in FL. I have a place to stay in FL. I was just going to visits someone while I was there, if there was someone there to visit.
I need a place to stay in Atlanta. Although Birmingham or Chattanooga could work too.
Maybe I should check on facebook. I guess I have more friends there.
It's true, you didn't have to friend anyone to show up here.
I have a friend in Atlanta whom I've told about Unfogged. He attends Jimmy Carter University, I think.
Before you complain about this blog not having commenters where you're going, think of all the blogs that don't have a Minneapolis-Pittsburgh axis.
I also need to know a good place along the I-75 corridor to buy shotguns.
Sawed off with a silencer? Or just the regular kind?
In Ontario, the I-75 corridor is the main supply vein for illegal firearms from Florida, Georgia, Ohio and Michigan.
Going to Ontario just to buy shotguns seems to be more trouble than it is worth.
41: how many active commenters are you assuming there are? I was using 1,000 as a rough estimate.
Uh.
Do you need some paperwork to buy a shotgun these days?
I only need one shotgun. The regular kind is fine.
What is a "regular" shotgun? I'm picturing 12 gauge, break action, double barrel.
65: Yes. Although I was responding to heebie, so all I meant by "regular" was that it didn't need to be sawed off with a silencer.
Obviously, you have to buy your own hacksaw and put in some work.
61 Uh.
No, it's true: one middle-aged balding man in a basement, and a group of 999 people who rotate the duties of commenting as "Moby Hick" among themselves.
Remember that day that Moby wasn't funny? That was because God was carrying him.
I don't even have a computer in basement.
I should probably do something about the basement this weekend if the kiddie soccer game gets rained out.
if it doesn't have knife missiles, it's not a droid. I want my iain m. banks shit. KNIFE MISSILES!!11
72: fuck yeah. Just finished "Player of Games." Want want want!
you've always got a bed here in narnia, urple. it's under a balinese hut with mosquito netting, it's really cute and romantic.
also ALWAYS BE CLOSING, I sold $7575 worth of furniture today, bitchez. w00t.
wait, halford's selling knife missiles? I'm all over that like white on rice.
Well, now you know where the bus station is, and NOW you know the rest of the story how to contact me.
if it doesn't have knife missiles, it's not a droid. I want my iain m. banks shit. KNIFE MISSILES!!11
I can't fault the sentiment but Banks's little beweaponed guys are drones, not droids. Which I always thought was a weird word choice considering they're fully sentient Culture citizens.
W.V.O. QUINE
Does anyone else here ever get that feeling of, "oh, there are whole bodies of reference taken for granted by people I talk to every day that I have never heard of"?
[NO SMEARCASE IT'S JUST YOU.]
The wikipedia page on Quine's theory of the indeterminacy of translation includes some wonderful phrases like "Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage."
ACTUALLY, REFERENCE IS INSCRUTABLE IN GENERAL.
Banks' drones usually aren't like anything but themselves, so why would they be droids? I vaguely assume that they don't reproduce.
The thing about WVOQ was that his first 22 years left him geographically, intellectually and culturally destined for greatness.
86 reminds me that I need to do the first grading of the term.
I don't understand Quine's hypnotic hold over analytic philosophers. The gavagai argument is stupid, the Quine-Dehem thesis is like a minor good point rather than a devastating rejoinder, and yet, BECAUSE IT'S QUINE OMIGOD IT'S SO AMAZING. I think your average theologian puts less weight on each sentence in the New Testament coming out of Jesus' mouth.
Wikipedia tells me the Quine-Duhem thesis is:
The Duhem-Quine thesis ... is that it is impossible to test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the hypothesis requires one or more background assumptions
There must be more to it than that, right? Because the obvious response to that is "no shit, ya think?"
Walt should read the Quine chapters of Millgram's Hard Truths.
Essear should read The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory.
This is the Duhem better also known for the Gibbs-Duhem relation? Huh.
Yes, unlike Quine, Duhem actually knew some things about science.
89: I don't understand Quine's hypnotic hold over analytic philosophers.
Well, sure, he's no McCoy Pauley, but he's hardly a stone wilson, using some commercial deck he bought off of Ling Warren's older brother, either.
85: Yes, I shouldn't have implied they ought to be called droids. I just think he could have come up with something better. "Drone" is at least original, I suppose.
I'm with Heebie. It is just you, Smearcase. Just you.
Man, for someone as highly retarded as Quine, an Erods number of 3 seems really high.
82
I'm more or less with you on the Quine. I read a book by him once but I have no memory of the content.
On the GRRM and Culture references, it's just you.
The thing about WVOQ was that his first 22 years left him geographically, intellectually and culturally destined for greatness.
I guess the Finger Lakes are a good location, but spending the last ten years simulcasting Syracuse's best country station isn't what I call intellectual or cultural greatness.
yeah, I know they're drones. I just want more knife missiles in my life. the ones that are weird are the AIs that just run, like, a human habitat-pod that can survive on a gas giant (not the coffin-sized type but one with several rooms). wouldn't that get kind of boring, brain the size of a planet and all? not different in principle from running a ship, I suppose. greatest ever ship name in iain m. banks: I thought he was with you. best suggestion by my 10-year-old daighter: hey, stop poking me! no, she doesn't get to read them, we just told her about the ships.
90: And yet here you are, critiquing a single proposition called the "Quine-Duhem thesis" in isolation.
The significant work was in noticing that this was something worth knowing, and that it its truth-value was relevant to a lot of other questions in philosophy (like the possibility of strictly analytic or strictly synthetic truths), not in determining whether it is true or not (which I agree is easy to do).
Well, sure, he's no McCoy Pauley, but he's hardly a stone wilson, using some commercial deck he bought off of Ling Warren's older brother, either.
This was pretty awesome. I had to google it--was this off the top of your head, Natilo? I tip my cap to you, sir.
Uniting the Culture- and philosophy- dorkiness: I really think there's an interesting paper to be written about how the Culture sheds light on the distinction between republican non-domination liberty and liberal non-interference liberty. I mean, for values of "interesting" proper to the topic; god, the papers on the subject are so. fucking. tiresome.
it is funny that the great mass of the culture is happy immortal people who can gland drugs they don't get hooked on, and explore fantastic orbitals, or live in various sims, or they are massive AIs beyond our puny comprehension, having fun doing math, etc, but the only thing we ever hear about it the tiny CIA-type special circumstances organization. and that's all we want to hear about. those happy people are boring.
do we want the culture to just go to every planet they can and free people from material want, or does that make them imperialist bastards? that's some prime directive shit right there. the culture people always fall in love with the...culture of the planet they're on, until they realize it runs on human misery, and even well after that...but they always have an escape hatch: knife missiles. not available to the poor shmucks on planet shithole feudalism. at the end of one book the protagonist has himself transformed into the male of this vicious species of squid-type creature who rape their female counterparts so violently part of their body is pulled away or something, and then the males wear them as decorations. he's portrayed as merrily playing some variant of squash with his best alien friend.
I actually would like to hear more about the happy people, or at least different kind of misfits. I like each Culture book I read a little bit less than the previous one, because it sticks with the same sort of people.
Since this thread is dead, I'll use it to ask if anyone can find Lizardbreath's review of The Half-Made World. While cleaning yesterday, I came across the copy I bought and lost after reading her post and enjoyed reading it while not listening to any television or radio news this weekend.
LB contributed tothis thread on CT, but I don't think she reviewed it at length here.
Yeah, I think that thread is the most I've said about it. I did like it, but I'm not terribly good at talking about books I like -- it's much easier to pick holes. I'll be buying the next one of his I see, definitely.
Weird. I guess I fabricated a memory of your post, starting off with a disclaimer about how Gilman was a friend. Damn noisemakers.
113: Yeah, that one I found. Google is not yet able to return links from my imagination, however.
I posted on Thunderer, albeit it was mostly about how the cover sucked badly enough to keep me from reading it until it was recommended on CT. I didn't say all that much about the book other than that it was good, and I think I said, although maybe I just thought, that it was kind of Moorcock-y. You might have conflated the two books.
Yeah, that was probably it, down to mentioning that he comments on Unfogged (I wasn't actually sure you had said friend, just that you mentioned a connection).
113. I should koko he liked it - it's a remarkable book by any standard.
118: It is very good, so I'm all the more disappointed that LB's post isn't there to tell me what to think of it.
Is it out in paperback? I should buy a paper copy -- I bought it and read it on my phone for the instant gratification, and it's not the same. Normally, anything worthwhile I'll reread, but I don't do that with ebooks for some reason, and I think I read them with less attention. I liked it, but I think I would have thought even better of it on paper rather than on screen.
@90
There must be more to it than that, right? Because the obvious response to that is "no shit, ya think?"
I think I've shilled for Susan Haack's Defending Science: Within Reason here before, but it has nice section on the Duhem-Quine thesis. She argues nicely that isn't the unbeatable universal solvent that some of the more excitable science critics seem to think it is.
As to the Culture, Look to Windward and Excession were my favorites. Knife missiles are OK, but I'd definitely settle for a life of hedonism on one of their resort orbitals or whatever they're called.
I love the bitchy tone of the conversations between the supposedly "well beyond our puny ability to grasp" AI Minds in Excession. So this is what near omnipotence gets you, hmm?
I'm sure there's something interesting with Duhem-Quine, it's just that teasing out what background assumptions are is, like, what we talk about when we talk about science, so I can't imagine that even 60 years ago a scientist who is told their conclusions rest on background assumptions wouldn't have said "Yeah, and?" Of course I have no idea what "strictly analytic" and "strictly synthetic" truths are or whether it's something I should care about.
Coincidentally, I just happened to be reading a part of Michael Tomasello's Origins of Human Communication that talked about 'gavagai' and argues that what human infants use when learning language -- that nonhuman animals lack -- is not just the association of the sound of the word with an event, but having established a shared attentional frame with the person who is talking, so that they're able to use a richer social context and repetition to resolve the problem of which of the possible meanings is the right one.
(Now I'm trying to remember why I'm reading this book -- I think I must have picked it up based on a recommendation either here or at Crooked Timber.)
The Susan Haack book is also on my queue of things to read soon, on the basis of discussions here, although I'm not getting through very many books lately. (But this morning I read In Praise of Shadows, and now I think maybe I need to go back and re-read Some Prefer Nettles to try to get a better sense of what the Bunraku puppet-theater stuff is all about. </bob>)
pauly shore told you to read it, remember?
122: I read this Tomasello book, which makes basically the same points (I think?), and for a volume with which I dramatically disagree it's stuck with me surprisingly completely.
maybe "dramatically" is the wrong word. "Thoroughly"?
The Wikipedia page for Duhem-Quine certainly does a good job of making it sound interesting and non-trivial, although I have no idea why they opted to include that illustration.
I mean, at the very least it would seem to pose nice questions about the validity of traditional statistical inference.
126: Yeah, I read those. Still not really getting it. Sufficiently abstract discussion always seems a little trivial, and then when they present examples, they're... not really any less trivial. So, yes, in one case a failure of Newtonian gravity turned out to be "dark matter" (Neptune) and in another case to be a need to modify our theory of gravity itself (the precession of Mercury's perihelion, correctly described once general relativity was invented). And, yes, this means that an observation might be interpreted in many possible ways, and it's unclear which assumption is being ruled out. But notice that in both cases the question was answered, because people went on to form more hypotheses and do more observations. This is what happens pretty much every time a surprising result is found in science: we don't know which assumption was problematic, so we think about the options and then do more tests and figure it out. This procedure of resolving the Duhem-Quine problem even has a name: we call it "science". (Was that too snarky? Sorry.)
And then there's this bit:
As Newton himself realized, van Fraassen points out, exactly the same predictions are made by the theory whether we assume that the entire universe is at rest or assume instead that it is moving with some constant velocity in any given direction: from our position within it, we have no way to detect constant, absolute motion by the universe as a whole. Thus, van Fraassen argues, we are here faced with empirically equivalent scientific theories
That's not more than one theory, that's one theory with a symmetry, which is kind of the underlying theme in all of physics. It doesn't lead to confusion about what the right theory is, and in fact it's basically the most powerful tool we have for thinking about physics because the assumption that we can't detect such absolute motion leads to a whole suite of conclusions about how motion works. No one has ever gone around feeling like their understanding of the universe was undetermined because they didn't know if everything was moving in the same direction at the same rate.
Perhaps this is over-mathematizing, but any time you study some sort of object you're studying it *up to some notion of equivalence.* Surely the right notion of equivalence for physical theories is "empirical equivalence." I have no idea what it means to say that two theories are "different" but "empirically equivalent."
Actually, now that I think about it, the right notion of equivalence probably "effectively empirically equivalent." That is, not only can you turn one description into the other description, but you can do so with an algorithm that runs in polynomial time in the size of the system. With that definition, I could imagine theories which were different but indistinguishable by experiment. But I'm pretty sure there aren't any known examples of that phenomenon in actual science.
There's an (apparently) famous series of papers about the internal structure of the earth, which is susceptible (practically speaking) only of indirect measurement, coming up with a variety of models for its variations in density (or a variety of forms that such models could take, or something; I only ever got a really high-level presentation of the relevant papers*). These theories are "empirically equivalent" in that they all account for the data equally well. One assumes they aren't equivalent in terms of what they'd predict would happen in various counterfactual situations, but we're sort of at the earth's mercy in terms of getting more data that would help more finely discriminate. So there's a kind of underdetermination problem here, though not (according to the guy whose half-remembered work I'm butchering here) the sort that's traditionally interested parties to the realism/instrumentalism debate. (And after all, as he observed, it's hard to be an anti-realist about the interior of the earth.) Nevertheless, there's a pretty clear sense in which such theories, given the present informational state, are equivalent but different—they aren't positing theoretical entities to explain observed effects, they're positing different distributions of density in an entity we're pretty sure is not merely theoretical, namely, the earth.
Admittedly if you had two theories that were empirically equivalent not just in the sense that they account equally well for what we know at a given time, but also in that no future information could possibly help us discriminate between them, one would have (I think) pretty good grounds for thinking they weren't really two different theories after all.
*actually not true, I now realize, since I got a draft of a job talk using the structure-of-earth stuff as examples which included a number of equations I absolutely didn't understand but which were present, I think, so that the candidate could defuse potential audience members who doubted his technical chops.
That's not more than one theory, that's one theory with a symmetry
Surely the equivalent "theories" relevant here are (i) the universe is in uniform motion; (ii) the universe is at rest, not the appendages that make it he case that (i) and (ii) are indiscriminable. I can hardly make sense of the idea that the whole universe might be either moving or at rest, so this seems like a weird example just starting out, but there's a difference between accepting a theory one of whose consequences is that we can't tell whether p or not-p and believing that there isn't (as they say) a fact of the matter whether p or not-p. Unless, of course, a further consequence of your acceptance of the theory is an unwillingness to grant the question whether p or not-p any determinate sense in the first place.
The papers are by George Bac/kus and Freeman Gil/bert.
Indeed there are lots of theories which can be distinguished in principal by doing experiments, but can't yet be distinguished in practice by doing experiments we already know how to do. This is certainly an interesting phenomenon in science, but the usual way to deal with it is well-known and standard: try to develop new techniques which will eventually let you do new experiments which can tell the difference. (I think this is exactly the point essear was trying to make with his "doing science" snark.)
When you start talking about the universe being in uniform motion or at rest, that's when you lose me. The whole point is that there's a symmetry which makes those two notions indistinguishable. There's no well-defined invariant notion of "at rest" there's only a notion of "inertial state." It doesn't make any sense to ask whether something is absolutely at rest.
The Quine-Duhem thing is partly useful as a massive hammer with which to fuck naive Popperians right over the head.
"So, the observation falsifies the theory."
"No, dumbass."
[Employ Quine-Duhem hammer.]
I'm sure there's something interesting with Duhem-Quine, it's just that teasing out what background assumptions are is, like, what we talk about when we talk about science, so I can't imagine that even 60 years ago a scientist who is told their conclusions rest on background assumptions wouldn't have said "Yeah, and?"
That isn't the point, really. The point is partly about counteracting a naive view about the relationship between theory and observation which was widely held then (and now).
And like a lot of things, Quine's target here (and with the gavagai stuff, etc) is primarily other philosophical theories/theorists. So saying, 'Well no-one could have been dumb enough to think otherwise' is to ignore the actual history of ideas into which Quine slots.
138: I flat-out don't believe this, that people really held as dumb ideas that Quine is supposed to be refuting. For example, physicists widely quote falsificationism as a criterion, and yet none of them are surprised by the Quine-Duhem thesis.
And the gavagai argument is empirically wrong. So score one for Quine's predecessors.
Anyway, the gavagai argument is a college-sophomore level argument. There are just as good arguments for solipsism, yet philosophers don't spend much team refuting solipsism.
One of the things struck me as good about analytic philosophy (and this could be completely wrong, since I'm not an expert) is that it ignores sophomore-level puzzlers like "how do we know that we're not just all dreaming". Except for sophomore-level puzzlers by Quine, which is are sacred.
You are misunderstanding Quine, I think. Particularly with reference to the gavagai thing. Quine's point isn't some stupid bit of sophomoric solipsism or anything akin to it. The sorts of empirical evidence sometimes raised against him are precisely the sorts of things he discusses in his paper. He's making a claim about the nature of meaning, and in favour of a particular type of methodological behaviourism, specifically addressing a particular family of views in the philosophy of language. I've no particular axe to grind for Quine but
he wasn't doing what I think you think he was doing.
And now, I am off to a conference for 3 days and won't be able to say why.
One final thing: Quine's targets here really were philosophers. He was quite concerned with giving science its proper place, and with telling philosophers to shut the feck up when it comes to things that science is better placed to deal with. Quine's holism, and his theories of meaning, epistemology, and so on, were directed largely at a particular naive meta-view of scientific practice [and not at the practice of actual working scientists], and at a specific set of families of views on the nature of meaning, knowledge of the world, and so on. He's quite consistent, and if you read Two Dogmas, the papers on indeterminacy in language, and so on, his targets are philosophers. He'd be the first to stand up and argue in favour of best scientific practice as a model, and against dumb philosophy. It would take too long to explain what the family of views he was targetting were, how and why his papers work together to target those views, and so on. But really, the views he was after were real, and widespread, and also themselves not entirely dumb.
I love the bitchy tone of the conversations between the supposedly "well beyond our puny ability to grasp" AI Minds in Excession.
It is a flaw with Culture AIs - Minds or drones - that they all tend to talk like that. I kept waiting for Skaffen-Amtiskaw to say "ooh, get her".
And now, I am off to a conference for 3 days and won't be able to say why.
An occupational hazard with philosophers.
Say "why" or we shoot the dog, idea boy.
If I'm understanding, he could say why, we just couldn't comprehend it.
142 One final thing: Quine's targets here really were philosophers.
Thanks, ttaM, this (and the rest of your comments) do a lot to clear up why it could have been important that someone say these things.
132: I'm not sure I understand what "polynomial time in the size of the system" is doing here. For instance, it might turn out that, when the LHC is finished, we still have the Standard Model and no clue about new physics at shorter energies. So then we'd have a set of "empirically equivalent" theories: the SM plus any set of deformations that don't affect physics at low energies in a substantial way, and they could be "effectively empirically equivalent" in that no one would ever get funding to tell them apart. But are they effectively empirically equivalent in your sense? What is the "system" whose "size" I'm supposed to be thinking about?
"Shorter energies" s/b "higher energies" or "shorter distances", I just couldn't decide which one to write.
146: true. "If someone from Falkirk could speak, we would certainly not be able to understand him" as Wittgenstein said.
(Some may argue that Wittgenstein was not aware of the existence of Falkirk. His own writings, however, contradict this: most famously, of course, his remark "I don't know why we are here, but I am pretty sure it is not in order to enjoy ourselves", which he is believed to have made while watching an East Stirlingshire home game.)
One final thing: Quine's targets here really were philosophers.
An odd thing that happened during the early 90s was that the Duhem-Quine thesis escaped into the wild and eclipsed Godel's theorem as the number one favorite thing to cite when claiming "See? Sophisticated philosophy supports my crank anti-science pet idea!"
Arguments of the form "You arrogant scientists don't actually distinguish between rival hypotheses anyway cuz Quine says so therefore homeopathy" were disturbingly common.
I wasn't meaning to talk about issues of whether you can practically do the measurements in that post. Instead I was just thinking about when two theories are formally the same, and the point I was trying to make was that if you can't efficiently turn one description into the other then it makes a certain amount of sense to say that they're different theories even if they give the exact same predictions in all cases.
I'm imagining some situation like mirror symmetry where you have two totally different looking descriptions which yield the same predictions in the end, but in addition imagining that there was no practical way to translate one description into the other. In that circumstance I could see the rationale behind calling them different theories.
That is, a theory is some mathematical model which allows you to make predictions based on knowing some initial conditions. If you have two different models based on different descriptions of reality, it might be that there's no efficient way to go between the descriptions of the initial conditions. In such a setting you might be justified in calling them "different theories."
153 seems to depend rather heavily on that phenomenon being mathematically possible; is it?
Probably, though currently we have almost no tools which can actually prove that something *can't* be done in polynomial time. P vs. NP gets all the press, but the following much weaker question is still open: can any calculation which can be done with a polynomial amount of memory and an arbitrary amount of time be done in polynomial time. That is, the *only way* we know how to prove that a calculation is inefficient is to show that you'd need too much memory to write down that answer.
But I'm sure someone could cook up a system which is widely believed to have this property assuming something like P != NP. Of course, it seems unlikely that reality would give such an example. (With the possible caveat that there's a decent chance I should be allowing quantum computers instead of ordinary computers in my definition of practical.)
At a less rigorous level, we definitely know examples of two theories that are dual (in the sense that there's an exact map between predictions of one and of the other) and yet nonetheless there are questions you can ask in one that are really difficult to answer, or even formulate, in the other. Whether there's a complexity-theoretic way to make this precise, I don't know.
156: but isn't translating between those sorts of things what category theory is for? I feel so let down by category theory already.
Category theory is good at making formal analogies clear and easy to work with, but I don't think it has much to say about making really nontrivial correspondences any easier to understand.
I flat-out don't believe this, that people really held as dumb ideas that Quine is supposed to be refuting. For example, physicists widely quote falsificationism as a criterion, and yet none of them are surprised by the Quine-Duhem thesis.
The lesson that you draw from this is that those physicists aren't "really" falsificationists? Or what?
160: That's what I'd think from what's been said here -- that physicists generally have an understanding of 'falsificationism' that is not perfectly equivalent to the rigorous philosophical statement of the same concept, and that the Quine-Duhem thesis is a problem for rigorously stated falsificationism, but not for the 'folk' version of it as understood by most scientists.
But I don't really know what I'm talking about on this issue at all.
Should I read the parts of this thread I've missed to see if I can use my hard earned knowledge of Lakatosian empistimology?
162: I am not having a good day here.
I was so worried about Lakatosian.
The Lakatosian Sioux couldn't spell for shit.
161.last, 162: Me Talk Epistemology One Day.
Do I worry about being punctured by Lakitusian projectiles? sometimes.
160: That no one is so dumb of a falsificationist that they would be startled by the Quine-Duhem thesis. So how can it be such a devastating rejoinder to falsificationism? It's because it's got the big Q in the name.
161: I don't believe that this perfectly rigorous yet dumb statement of falsificationism exists. Maybe Popper himself subscribed to it -- my reading of Popper is that he does overrate the significance of any single experiment (since there's always the possibility that the experimenters just fucked up) -- but basically no else does. Maybe some dumb teenager commenting on discover.com does, but that's it. It's basically made-up straw-person that analytic philosophers must believe in, because otherwise why would the sacred Quine have to push such simplistic arguments, unless someone drove him to it? Jesus wouldn't have had to drive the moneychangers out of the temple, if there weren't moneychangers.
Quine must have stomped on Walt's kitten back in the day.
167 Do I worry about being punctured by Lakitusian projectiles? sometimes.
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud.
161: Huh, okay. My past experience has been that when you turn to examples, scientists (no need to pick on physicists on *this* occasion!) will say things that are in tension with D-Q. Yes, once you state D-Q they will back off. But (I have taken this to mean in the past) that just shows that they have inconsistent beliefs about science. I don't think this typically adversely affects their practice as scientists.
Agree that Quine is not the apotheosis of rigorous philosophical argumentation. Often there is no argument at all, just a picture--which has its own place.
I want to go read that Haack chapter.
Is that what happened to that kitten? I knew there was something sinister about that Quine fellow.
171: Ask them what they do, not what they think or say. It seems like a lot of people have this hard-wired Popper module in their brain where if you ask them what science is about they recite something they were once told. But, luckily, it has little or nothing to do with their actual behavior when faced with real data.
Hey, we should put an experimental philosopher to work on this question of what scientists' views about falsificationism are, really! That would be more interesting than the other stuff they spend their time on.
a lot of people have this hard-wired Popper module in their brain
Fried food is good, but I prefer wings.
Totally agree with 173, with the proviso that I also think it matters, socially, what scientists say about science, and not just how they conduct their business in the labs/journals/conferences.
171: I can believe that they haven't carefully thought about it, which is why -- back before the kitten-stomping -- I called it a good point. It's just not a completely devastating point.
One of the best uses of philosophy is to get what people say they think to match what they actually do.
commenting on discover.com
It does seem like that (and similar venues) is where your most likely to encounter people aggressively pushing naive Popperism.
178: One of the best uses of philosophy is to get what people say they think to match what they actually do.
So join in the philosophy army
Logic is the weapon we loose
In the fight against hypocrisy, war, and injustice.
Ready! Aim! Deduce!
181: Could you work in something about inference to the best explanation?
I have no idea what it means to say that two theories are "different" but "empirically equivalent."
One way is to just look at the ordinary surface meaning of the words in the theories. A long time ago I read a paper that used the example of different interpretations of Newtonian gravity that were not just empirically equivalent, they were mathematically equivalent. (This means, I think, that the two theories don't just yield the same empirical predictions, but the math in one theory can be mapped on to the math in the other in some easy and important way.)
But here's the deal. The two theories still said the world was made up of different things. On one, the universe was made of bodies and forces, and on the other the universe was made up of (I think) deformations in space.
Now I can hear vividly in my head physicists saying "look, if the two theories are mathematically equivalent, who cares which one you talk about? There's no real difference between them.
But the words used to describe the theories still mean different things, even if the math doesn't reflect that. A world that is made of bodies and forces is different than a world that is made up of deformations in space, just as a world made up of independent spirits and angels is different than a world where we are all modes of being of God.
Remember the war against Franco?
A triumph for pure cogitation.
Though he may have won all the battles,
We had the inference to the best explanation.
183.last. Nope. It's just the same world.
Oh the Humeans hate the Kantians
and the Kantians hate the Humeans
and the Catholics hate the Spinozists
and everybody hates John Locke.
Lots of productive science is done with very poor theoretical underpinnings, or theoretical underpinnings only loosely tied to empirical results.
I think that the web of knowledge with empirical boundary conditions framework that Quine put forth is most useful in this commonly encountered context. There are some lines of thinking that just seem pointless, and taking the trouble to work out the empirical basis for such hunches is often helpful.
But during National Comity Week, National Comity Week,
Karl Popper and Wittgenstein are dancing cheek to cheek.
It's fun to eulogize
The people you despise,
As long as you don't let 'em in your school.
I've oft (okay, just once, and today) despaired at the neglect of philosophy in the Tom Lehrer corpus, but now I can rest easy.
