View Single Post
Old 06-19-2008, 04:06 AM   #62 (permalink)
roachboy
 
roachboy's Avatar
 
Super Moderator
Location: essex ma
just as a proof is a simple procedure shaped by particular rules and based on particular axioms which cannot be demonstrated from within it, so notions of causation or regularity are frame-contingent. like hain said above, when you go past applications into conceptual underpinnings, things get murky and strange in almost any science.

there is nothing magic about a proof.
there is nothing magic about experiment.
both have a circular structure logically in that characteristics of the axioms recur through the proof, and frame-characteristics repeat through experiments.
made general, this distinction is the basis for the notion of paradigm in thomas kuhn's work on scientific revolutions--and he outlines several examples/parables of "normal science"--predicated on the confirmation-through-repetition of the prevailing community consensus--results in anomalies being classified as error--until an alternate explanation is developed (if it is) that refigures the underlying frames which enable information to be grouped, regularities inferred and "normal science" to resume its confirmation-through-repetition functions.

people have trouble with new shit. so in a general sense, it's not quite as The Dude tells us in Scripture: the "problem" is not that he is not privy to new shit--in a general sense, our collective affection for repetition, for the same, obstructs the making-coherent of new shit--unless it can be processed as a variant of what "we" already know. so in a way, there is no new shit. new shit is a variant of the old. until it isn't.

paradigms in kuhn are institutional ideologies, basically: you see similar problems in relation to ideologies all over the place, where-ever you look.
but thinking ideology is curiously enough a matter for the soft-to-flaccid sciences, and not something that the manly men who deal in formal languages will mess with.

such is the religious appeal of number, unexamined. guy is right, above.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Last edited by roachboy; 06-19-2008 at 04:08 AM..
roachboy is offline  
 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73