Transcript Session 3: Reading and writing a massive online hypertext

Session 3: Reading and writing a
massive online hypertext
William P. Hall
President
Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters
Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org
[email protected]
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net
Access my research papers from
Google Citations
Tonight
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Before starting on content in the next
Meetup, I’ll discuss three topics about how
the book interacts with the world of human
knowledge
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How content in the book relates to the world of
scholarly and scientific knowledge
How these relationships are implemented in the
book
Survey of the tools used to write (and read) the
book
Aspects of the book reflect on these topics
Creating and using
scholarly and
scientific knowledge
Learning to understand and resolve my
paradigmatic crisis
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PhD work based on 10 year study of chromosome variation,
systematics, and biogeography of sceloporine iguanid lizards in
North America (begun 1964 – finished at Harvard 1967-73)
At UoM in 1978 a trusted reviewer accused me of being
unscientific in my approach to publishing my thesis research
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Ended up spending most of my time researching the history and
philosophy of sciences to understand the issues
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Spent two summers in the field with me and was my lab assistant for a year
What was knowledge and what made claims to know something scientific?
Hall, W.P. 1983. Modes of speciation and evolution in the sceloporine iguanid
lizards. I. Epistemology of the comparative approach and introduction to the
problem
Karl Popper, Evolutionary Epistemology and
Radical Constructivism
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Fundamental to all scholarship and our present exercise: what is
knowledge and how do we come to know things?
Epistemology/theory of knowledge – a major theme of my book
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Karl Popper and radical constructivism: Knowledge claims are
cognitively constructed
 There is no direct connection between external reality (“truth”)
and any mental image/picture of that truth
 Sensation and consciousness of that sensation involves many
physiological transformation of information as the consequences
of an environmental stimulus propagate towards the brain
Karl Popper: living entities construct knowledge of the world
through ideas/claims, trying out those ideas, and the
selective elimination of erroneous claims
For more background see: Hall, W.P. 2014. Evolutionary epistemology
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versus faith and justified true belief ― Does science work and can we
know the truth? Atheists Society Lecture, Unitarian Church, East
Melbourne, 12 August 2014
1. PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION AND INITIAL SPECULATIONS
3a. COLLECT OTHER
NEEDED DATA
2. SELECT APPROPRIATE NATURAL ‘EXPERIMENTS’ AND
‘CONTROLS’ TO ILLUSTRATE PROBLEM
ARE
CORRELATIONS
FOUND
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4. DO CROSS-CORRELATION ANALYSES OF N-DIMENSIONAL
MATRICES TO IDENTIFY SIGNIFICANT PHENOMENA
YES
My answer to the
problem: How to
scientifically understand
real world complexity?
5a. REVISE AND/OR REPLACE
MODEL AS INDICATED BY
NEW CORRELATION
ANALYSES
5. GENERATE MODELS THROUGH ANALOGY, INDUCTION,
ETC. WHICH PROVIDE CAUSAL EXPLANATIONS FOR
SIGNIFICANTLY CORRELATED PHENOMENA
NO
• Build, test & criticize as
as many connections as
possible between
theory and
7. TEST ASSMPTIONS:
reality
a. DEMONSTRATIONS
b. H D EXPERIMENTS
c. SIMULATIONS
OK
?
4a. FURTHER CROSS
CORRELATION ANALYSES
WITH NEW DATA
3. COLLECT DATA FROM EXPERIMENTS AND CONTROLS
NO
NO
6.
IS MODEL LOGIC
OK?
SHOULD
MATRICES BE RERANKED ?
YES
6a. IS
MODEL LOGIC
OK?
YES
NO
8.
a.
b.
c.
TEST PREDICTIONS:
SAME PHENOMENA OF NEW CASES
OTHER PHENOMENA OF ORIGINAL CASES
OTHER PHENOMENA OF OTHER CASES
YES
9. TEST RECONSTRUCTIONS:
DO MODELS PLAUSIBLY
RECONSTRUCT CASES
ACCORDING TO EVIDENCE?
NO
YES
OK
?
NO
YES
AND
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10.
A NATURAL PHENOMENON HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED AND UNDERSTOOD,
BUT THIS UNDERSTANDING SHOULD BE HELD ONLY AS LONG AS IT
PROVIDES REALISTIC EXPLANATIONS OF OBSERVATIONS ABOUT NATURE
YES
OK
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NO
The early Popper vs. the mature Popper
on epistemology
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Popper 1959, 1963
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Popper (1972 – “Objective Knowledge”) biological approach
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We can’t prove if we know the truth
There is no such thing as induction
Deductively falsifying a theory is deterministic
Correspondence theory of truth
Make bold hypotheses and try to falsify them –
what is left is better than what has been falsified
Falsifiability demarcates science from pseudoscience
Knowledge is a biological phenomenon
Knowledge is solutions to problems of life
All knowledge is cognitively constructed (Popper is a radical constructivist!)
Falsification doesn’t work in the real world; claims can be protected by
auxiliary hypotheses (All claims to know must be regarded as fallible)
Three worlds ontology
“Tetradic schema” / “general theory of evolution” to eliminate errors and
build knowledge
Many contemporary philosophers misunderstand Objective Knowledge
– “Objective knowledge” = knowledge codified into/onto a physical
object (DNA, printed paper, pitted CD, magnetic domains)
Knowledge is constructed
Impossible to know whether a claim is true or not
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Vision does not form an image of
external reality
The brain does not perceive reality, it
constructs a model
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Problems
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Perception and cognition are
consequences of propagating action
potentials in a neural network.
Action potentials stimulated by physical
perturbations to neurons
Perception lags reality
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“Problem of Induction” - any number of
confirmations does not prove the next
test will not be a refutation (e.g.,
Gettier)
The biological impossibility to know if a
claim to know is true
Clock, via Wikimedia
Popper’s evolutionary theory of knowledge
Natural selection builds knowledge (= solutions to problems)
Pn
a real-world problem faced by a
living entity
TS a tentative solution/theory.
Tentative solutions are varied
through serial/parallel iteration
EE a test or process of error
elimination
Pn+1 changed problem as faced by an
entity incorporating a surviving
solution
Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge – An Evolutionary Approach
The whole process is iterated
(1972), pp. 241-244
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All knowledge claims are constructed, cannot be proven to be true
TSs may be embodied as “living structure” in the “knowing” entity, or
TSs may be expressed in words as hypotheses, subject to objective criticism; or as
genetic codes in DNA, subject to natural selection
Objective expression and criticism lets our theories die in our stead
Through cyclic iteration, sources of errors are found and eliminated
Solutions/theories become more reliable as they survive repetitive testing
Surviving TSs are the source of all knowledge!
How is this reflected in scientific publishing?
Constructing formal knowledge
Body of Formal
Knowledge
EDITORIAL
REVIEW
EXPLICIT
SUBMIT
BoFK
Pn
O
O
EE
TTs “WE”
“I”
EE
“THEM”
O
REWORK
FORMAL PUBLISH
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EDITORIAL
DECISION &COMMENT
Formal knowledge is considered “safe to use”
PEER
REVIEW
Building the Web of Knowedge
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How the book
connects to the
world of knowledge
Hypertextually navigating the landscape of
the web of knowledge
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Paradigms are attractor basins (“swamps”) in the topography of the global web
of knowledge
Links to the web access knowledge objects that help us cross
paradigm boundaries towards unification
Bibliographic connections
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Footnotes
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My tool kit
Nothing very special
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General idea
Body of Formal Knowledge
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Web browser
Access to eJournals
Google / Google Scholar
Microsoft Word
Microsoft PowerPoint
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TinyURL
Understand some HTML
Adobe Acrobat
There is a lot more to Scholar than meets the eye
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