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Old 01-03-2008, 10:19 AM   #61 (permalink)
roachboy
 
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next day--truth as correspondence would be truth more in the sense that you'd use to refer to a statement generated via a proof that is valid or true (its production doesn't violate any rules)...

if i remember correctly, heidegger talks about correspondence between a signifier and its putative referent as an example--so correspondence is also about expectations and whether they are met or not.

the organization of information involves both patterns of realtime phenomena and secondary patterns (maybe--not sure if they'd be separate, and dont know how you'd know whether they were, but they seem secondary) of expectations concerning what is to follow.

expectations or projections are important in the reduction of complexity, which is a basic perceptual task. projections are the space where different registers of organization get intertwined, confused, conflated and so are the space in which, say, assumptions about how Things Are Organized in the Biggest Possible Sense get superimposed on more local phenomena---

this is probably going too far afield, but anyway since i've been working with this stuff it is jammed into my brain so here goes: edmund husserl talks about internal time consciousness as being comprised of a sequence of operations: retention, protension and modalization. time consciousness is a way of modelling thinking (which is not embodied for husserl) as temporal--as unfolding in time, as unfolding time---but a temporal process that generates a perceptual field (a visual field) that is relative stable, like what you see when you look around, or what you see as you read this...the sentences remain stable as perceptual data even as time ticks ticks ticks--the processes that enable you to read this are not processes that you experience directly, but they have to be in place and operative if you are reading this. so time consciousness is a way to model the transition from a temporal flux into organizable perceptual data. so it's about pattern generation--retention is a way of talking about how instantaneous visual data is coalated at a slight lag--husserl talks about types of edge recognition as the basis for patterning the contents of the field generated around this instantaneous visual data--so retention is a variant of memory that fixes elements abstracted from a temporal flux and renders them organizable---protension is the projection forward in time of expectations which are rooted in the fashioning of an object from temporal data---modalization is the adjustment of expectations to fit variation or change in perceptual data.

now there are problems with this model, most of which have to do with the way time is itself modelled...and that, if you think about it, if this operation was geared in fact around the production of objects in isolation, it'd be terribly slow. on the second point, i think that for husserl it follows from his desire to relegate language to a second-order operation, which gets introduced into the game of perception at the level of judgments about organized data, which is not implicit in the organization itself. anyway, i might be digressing (this shit has infested my brain)...

so to go back to the idea of experiment, you can see a structure of expectations built into an experiment's design.
these expectations are hedged round by any number of frames--the history of other such experiments, the accepted definitions of the phenomena being investigated, the collection of descriptions that enables results to be anticipated, etc.
so correspondence operates.
once established as valid or true, an experimental result can then be inserted into broader images of the world as coherent, as true or valid--these broader conceptions are not subjected to anything like the analysis that the experimental data is, but nonetheless, in a strange way, the inserting of experimental data into a "set" ordered around these other, unexamined signifiers (like god) functions to validate them.
this seems inevitable---if anything about husserl's time consciousness idea is correct, we mostly live in networks of expectations which are either met or not as we move through particular perceptual regions or fields.
it is not easy to separate different registers of expectation...and those who engage in scientific work are no more equipped to do it than anyone else necessarily--personally, i think this a consequence of the separation of scientific investigation and philosophical investigation, which to my mind should be talking to each other, but which in 3-d tend not to, particularly not in the states (as a function of the separation of disciplines)....

i wonder if this makes any sense at all.
meh--------posting it anyway.
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