[FRIAM] the role of metaphor in scientific thought

[Steven A Smith]

Marcus -
>
> The _/From Other Tongues/_ sketch is good.  Both what is heard and 
> what is said could be modeled as a closure over some subjective 
> representation.
>
...
>
> The squiggles suggest that the types are not yet shared amongst the 
> agents.
>
I agree with this, but the theme of the "From Other Tongues" collection 
is that one culture (and in this case associated language) has atomic 
concepts built into it (as a single common word) which do not have an 
atomic word in the other language and in fact may not lend themselves to 
a succinct description.  In fact, I believe entire books, multivolume 
sets, maybe even libraries have been written on and dedicated to a 
concept native to one culture but not to another?

My favorite: "Tingo" from Pascucense (Easter Islanders) is succinctly 
described as "to gradually steal all of one's neighbor's possessions by 
borrowing them one at a time and not returning them".     The fact of a 
single word for this suggests that in that culture it is a much more 
common occurrence than in our own, or that the number of possessions 
involved is a tiny fraction of what we are familiar with, or the 
attachment to them by the original owner is so minimal that it is 
*possible* for Alice to borrow all of Bob's possessions before he might 
notice "what she did there".

Sobremesa is Spanish (and Frank and a few others may have their own 
input) for "the sociable time after a meal when you have food-induced 
conversations with the people you have had a meal with.

WedTech has an element of Sobremesa, but also has some of the overtones 
that Stephen once observed at the Complex:  "When you get together with 
a group of autistics, they might all appear to be listening intently to 
your every word, when in fact they are just waiting intently for you to 
pause so THEY can talk about what THEY are interested in!"

>  I’m not sure I agree in the value of the interpolations and 
> extrapolations of ontologies.  It sounds too much like “agree to 
> disagree”.
>
I think that it does begin as "agree to disagree", my main formal 
experience with Ontologies is the Gene Ontology and that is perhaps 10 
years stale now, but at the time, it was apparently considered to be the 
most elaborated single technical ontology with a huge amount of work put 
forth to bring it to it's current state.  I think the number of concepts 
was roughly 5,000 at the time.
>
>  Progress I think requires aggressively creating and destroying types 
> and constant by negotiation and empirical validation.
>
I do believe a great deal of this was done in order to come to the level 
of "agreement" in place, but it was anecdotally understood that this was 
more of a "Rosetta Stone" linking the more accurate and apt Ontologies 
from the many subfields...   it was more useful for translation than for 
understanding, and that real understanding required learning the 
language/ontology of the subfields.   I don't think these are 
"disagreements" but rather an awareness that there is a fuller richness 
behind the formalisms agreed upon for convenience of discussion.
>
> Many “interpretations” just put off getting to the bottom of things.   
> Keep the interpretations around long enough to get parallax on a 
> better interpretation, then press Delete.
>
I do agree with this in a mild form.   Many of us here are very 
interested in Etymology because often there is some deeper understanding 
residing in a word's original use, just as the calling up of deprecated 
terms can turn out to be useful for many reasons.

John Zingale referenced something in last Monday's Salon about how 
idioms frm early string theory investigations was almost deprecated when 
it found new utility in quantum loop gravity?    I am winging this if 
John wants to correct me.

I think that a great deal of the "Ontology" developed by Alchemists 
before the Age of Enlightenment was still useful long after the 
Enlightenment brought a new way of thinking about Natural Sciences and 
in fact remains useful in the form of the Periodic Table. Similarly 
Newtonian vs Relativistic Mechanics, not to mention Quantum Theory?   
Each has a domain of utility which may last past a formal resolution of 
the differences and an agreement on a shared view (e.g. GUT)?

Closer to shared/reserved lexicons, I don't know if Newton's and 
Leibnitz' differing notations for Calculus also differences in how 
facile one using one or the other might be with the same concepts?

- Steve
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