[FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis and return to(ward) the point at 
hand.  Your comparison of "closure" to Nick's idea of "surplus" 
(intentional or not) meaning.   I accept that in programming a computer, 
"closure" is a useful tool, to avoid unintended "side effects".   In 
natural language, I think a certain amount of ambiguity is 
*necessary*.   Perhaps not in the most dry and literal of technical 
manuals or even journal papers.  But there are many other modes of 
communication where I believe that ambiguity and multiple meanings and 
even "side effects" or "un/intentional surplus" is not only a good thing 
but perhaps critical to the goal of that communication.

I would say that exploratory brainstorming is a key example.   I would 
suggest that the value of this list (to me) is precisely that mode.  
There is nothing expressed literally on this list that I couldn't have 
looked up for myself.   It is the collective curatorial value of this 
group that makes it useful and interesting to me.   It is the eclectic 
*context* of the members of this group which makes it (much) more than 
Wikipedia.  After many years of reading others on this list, I 
appreciate the wide perspectives offered by the computational/simulants 
(e.g. Glen/Marcus), the social scientists (e.g. Nick et al), the 
Educators (e.g. Angel, Sherwood, Chabon, now fled?), the non-US-born 
(e.g. Vlad, Jochen, Mohammed), the exPatriot (Gary Schulz), the women 
(e.g. Jenny, Merle, Dede, Patricia, et. al), the youth (Cody, Gil, ???), 
the TechnoMystics (Rich Murray), the Mathematicians (Wimberly, et al), 
the Generalists, the Complexitists, the Lightweights, the Heavy Hitters, 
etc.

The *many* reserved lexicons and alternative uses of similar words adds 
to the rich fecundity of the discussions *when* they blossom here.

I DO find it useful to niggle out of others, where there is 
*intentional* vs *unintentional* surplus, and perhaps more to the point 
*misintentional* or worse *malintentional* surplus.   Nick jumped me 
about using "inform" a dozen threads ago, I think assuming that my 
choice of that word was sloppy parroting of a certain "style" of talk 
(perhaps a subdialect of PostModernism?).   I defended it as best I 
could (and had to think carefully about why I chose "inform" instead of 
the alternative(s) he offered which admittedly WERE more "plainspoken".  
I was not offended by Nick's questioning my use of this specific word, 
because it forced me to think more carefully about my use and to provide 
the context to the rest of you who might actually be reading the 
otherwise TL;DR material for the nuanced meaning I was trying to offer.

Ramble,

  - Steve


On 6/23/17 9:13 AM, ┣glen┫ wrote:
> Ha!  I struggled to come up with "single" as an alternative name and you had 4 waiting in the wings.
>
> I'm going to skip ahead a bit and state that my entire line of rhetoric about circularity goes back to the complexity jargon discussion we were having and whether or not, as Nick put it, a system has a say in its own boundary.  It's all about _closure_.  This particular tangent targets closure from the functional programming perspective (or maybe from the procedural one, depending on how you look at it).  When you execute a loop in a "systems" language like C, you have a good chance that whatever you do in there could have side effects.  But when you do something like that in a purely functional language, you're very unlikely (never) going to leave side effects laying around.
>
> If the unmarried person in the just-so story were somehow "closed", then there would be no side effects left lying around as a result of walking _any_ path from the name "unmarried" to/from any other name like "widow".  But people aren't ever "closed" in any vernacular sense (never mind Rosen's or Kauffman's parsing of agency for a while).  That's why I asserted that the existence of _any_ other name (bachelor, single, widow, whatever) opens up an entirely new world of side effects (including what Peirce should call practical) to the unmarried patient.  The fact that the condition even has _names_ opens it up to nomothetic generality.  An entirely unique condition, showing up nowhere else in space or time will not have a name and is not generalizable, by definition.
>
> FWIW, in his introduction, Nick does distinguish 3 types of implication important to analogical reasoning: "basic", "surplus-intentional", and "surplus-unintentional".  And the latter 2 types are, I think, directly related to computational side effects, where type 3 would be a bug, type 2 might be considered sloppy, and type 1 is the ideal.  This is a fantastic way to talk about this sort of thing.  But it would be easier to discuss if we either avoided discussion of circularity _or_ gave it the full analytic context it needs (starting from a relatively complete definition of closure).
>
> You may be asking: If Nick's talking about analogs and implications, how does that relate to a computational procedure?  Well, simulation has several meanings, the 2 main ones being: mimicry vs. implementation.  I'd say 90% of simulation is about implementation.  E.g. an ODE solver numerically implements (simulates) an ideal/platonic mathematical declaration.  So, when you write a program, the computer that executes it (only during the execution) is an analog to whatever other (physical or platonic) construct might also be described by such a mathematical declaration.  Either of these two analogs can leave (surplus) side effects lying about as they reify their analogous (basic) behaviors.
>
> I hope that's not tl;dr. 8^)
>
>
> On 06/23/2017 06:52 AM, Frank Wimberly wrote:
>> Has anybody mentioned that there are lot of unmarried men that you usually
>> wouldn't call bachelors?  There are widowers, priests, and nineteen
>> year-olds, for example.  I learned the word because my father's brother was
>> a thirty-five year old Major in the Air Force with no wife. He eventually
>> got married and had children. Late bloomer?