The Truth – A Paskian Perspective
Nick Green
Dear All
I tried to keep
it short but Pask is a hard taslmaster!:-) The question is "how
free of ambiguity is the analogy describing an event?". Here
goes:
If an observer or participant witnesses an event a concept is formed and a description may be produced. This process is subjective and private for the atoms that make us. The concept is interpreted by a participant and a description produced. However the description of an event in a particular context is limited by the perspectives of the recipient and the length of the observation time (aka Faith no less!). The test of the Truth of a description is in its applicability said Pask. In general the description will produce a new relation and the question is “Is the relation correct?” e.g. my name is Nick Green, or did the bus leave at ten o’clock, water boils at approximately 100 degrees C. More taxing might be e.g. “Did they like it?”.
Events can be caused spontaneously and thus are observable and respectable or they may require some preliminary act or stimulus to be produced in which case they are responsible (This is the difference between a classical measurement and a quantum measurement). Descriptions if shared and interpreted by another participant and found to be applicable can lead to Agreement or as meanings are refined, ambiguities are removed, agreement-to-disagree or separation (and thanks to Bernard Scott and the late Ranulph Glanville for pointing this out to me and, of course, Paul Pangaro whose thesis introduced the forces separating Concepts). Pask’s famous No Doppelgangers dictum insists that no two descriptions are the same unless great care is taken and agreed standard consensus methods or rituals performed eg integer counting with the Natural numbers.
But even then in some extreme limit all products are all different. Results are never identical at some level of precision. Perfect copies, like Truths, or correct descriptions are impossible. Enormous redundancies in systems are required to overcome these practical limitations. There is, as Pask once instructed me “No such thing as invariance” (Day one of my second job with him).
We proceed in
practice by accepting a level of variance which is minimized as
we remove ambiguity (by considering the precursor concepts and
descriptions that are necessary). We consider the epistemology
of the semantics we apply in producing our description. This is
often called evidence.
We are actually intuitively using the scientific method here by comparing and describing, as unambiguously as possible, the differences. When we think we prune our entailment mesh of concepts (memories) to some necessary depth set by the level of ambiguity or imprecision participants can tolerate.
This all arises from applying ideas embodied in Pask’s axioms of Interactions of Actor Theory (see wiki). We seek replication of the description of a concept, we seek a consensus agreement amongst participants so that meanings can be more easily shared. This not only describes scientific method, it describes democracy! No doubts Gordon was deep. Many thought him genius. His colleagues, including me, were too often sceptical of this. His insistence on the “hard carapace” (implying systems make their own boundaries) and No Doppelgangers were barely appreciated by us. I stand to be corrected.
In the end he settled on a cooling Nature's need to produce innovative coherences which participants (be they atomic, human or international) hope will persist. A principle we see Nature applying both in Cosmology and Evolution. Coherence being strictly defined as closed systems of spins with constant average phase angle shedding radiation to maintain both thermostasis or frequency of Interaction and thus equilbrium. These coherences exist as concepts in the brain or the states of persisting material objects when regarded as collections of interacting waves or messages. These days most physicists would agree (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_information). The information content of objects is increasingly seen as their fundamental property. This permits one to think of Cybernetics as “the study of the messages that atoms exchange”.
Pask favoured Rescher’s Coherence Theory of Truth but with the restriction that set boundaries and members exert a repulsive force. In his Last Theorem he stated “Like Concepts (or spins) repel and unlike attract”.
One lesson from this for web users is they cannot escape responsibility for their messages. We have to ask ourselves is the web’s pseudo anonymity really a good thing?
Best
N.
Benjamin P. Taylor
20 Evesham Way London SW11 5QX
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Benjamin P. Taylor
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