Session 3: Reading and writing a massive online hypertext

William P. Hall President Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org william-hall@bigpond.com http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net

Access my research papers from Google Citations

Tonight

Before starting on content in the next Meetup, I’ll discuss three topics about how the book interacts with the world of human knowledge – 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

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Creating and using scholarly and

scientific knowledge

Learning to understand and resolve my paradigmatic crisis

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

– 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?

Ended up spending most of my time researching the history and philosophy of sciences to understand the issues

– 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

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Karl Popper, Evolutionary Epistemology and Radical Constructivism

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 – 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 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 5

1. PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION AND INITIAL SPECULATIONS

2. SELECT APPROPRIATE NATURAL ‘EXPERIMENTS’ AND ‘CONTROLS’ TO ILLUSTRATE PROBLEM

3. COLLECT DATA FROM EXPERIMENTS AND CONTROLS

4. DO CROSS-CORRELATION ANALYSES OF N-DIMENSIONAL MATRICES TO IDENTIFY SIGNIFICANT PHENOMENA

5. GENERATE MODELS THROUGH ANALOGY, INDUCTION, ETC. WHICH PROVIDE CAUSAL EXPLANATIONS FOR SIGNIFICANTLY CORRELATED PHENOMENA

ARE

CORRELATIONS FOUND

?

6. IS MODEL LOGIC

OK?

SHOULD MATRICES BE RE-

RANKED ?

6a. IS MODEL LOGIC

OK?

8. TEST PREDICTIONS: a. SAME PHENOMENA OF NEW CASES b. OTHER PHENOMENA OF ORIGINAL CASES c. OTHER PHENOMENA OF OTHER CASES

3a. COLLECT OTHER NEEDED DATA

4a. FURTHER CROSS CORRELATION ANALYSES WITH NEW DATA

5a. REVISE AND/OR REPLACE MODEL AS INDICATED BY NEW CORRELATION ANALYSES

9. TEST RECONSTRUCTIONS: DO MODELS PLAUSIBLY RECONSTRUCT CASES ACCORDING TO EVIDENCE?

7. TEST ASSMPTIONS: a. DEMONSTRATIONS b. H D EXPERIMENTS c. SIMULATIONS

OK ?

OK ?

OK ?

AND

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

NO

NO

NO

NO

NO YES

YES

YES YES

YES

YES

YES

NO NO

My answer to the problem: How to scientifically understand real world complexity? • Build, test & criticize as

as many connections as possible between theory and reality

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Popper 1959, 1963 – 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

Popper (1972 – “Objective Knowledge”) biological approach – 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)

The early Popper vs. the mature Popper on epistemology

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Vision does not form an image of external reality

The brain does not perceive reality, it constructs a model

– Perception and cognition are consequences of propagating action potentials in a neural network.

– Action potentials stimulated by physical perturbations to neurons

– Perception lags reality Problems

– “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

Knowledge is constructed Impossible to know whether a claim is true or not

8 Clock, via Wikimedia

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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

The whole process is iterated • 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!

Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge – An Evolutionary Approach (1972), pp. 241-244

Body of Formal Knowledge

BoFK

“I” “WE” “THEM”O

O

TTsEE

Pn

O

EE

EXPLICITSUBMIT

EDITORIALREVIEW

PEERREVIEW

EDITORIALDECISION &COMMENTFORMAL PUBLISH

REWORK

BoFK

“I” “WE” “THEM”O

O

TTsEE

Pn

O

EE

EXPLICITSUBMIT

EDITORIALREVIEW

PEERREVIEW

EDITORIALDECISION &COMMENTFORMAL PUBLISH

REWORK

BoFK

“I” “WE” “THEM”O

O

TTsEE

Pn

O

EE

EXPLICITSUBMIT

EDITORIALREVIEW

PEERREVIEW

EDITORIALDECISION &COMMENTFORMAL PUBLISH

REWORK

BoFK

“I” “WE” “THEM”O

O

TTsEE

Pn

O

EE

EXPLICITSUBMIT

EDITORIALREVIEW

PEERREVIEW

EDITORIALDECISION &COMMENTFORMAL PUBLISH

REWORK

How is this reflected in scientific publishing? Constructing formal knowledge

Formal knowledge is considered “safe to use”

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Building the Web of Knowedge

How the book connects to the

world of knowledge

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Hypertextually navigating the landscape of the web of knowledge

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

General idea Body of Formal Knowledge

– Web browser – Access to eJournals – Google / Google Scholar

Microsoft Word Microsoft PowerPoint TinyURL Understand some HTML Adobe Acrobat 17

There is a lot more to Scholar than meets the eye

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