Re: [Fis] Consilience & patchiness of knowledge

A follow-up on Aleks's comment:

> There must be some common ground in order to exchange information. If I
> note
> down the letters "dog", others have to know what this refers to.

> The common ground only needs to provide the framework, the structure. The
> details are filled in by each individual. It makes no sense to use English
> sentences to describe the exact shape of a dog. Everyone knows what a dog
> looks like, why communicate this explicitly, if it suffices to have a
> bunch
> of dog exemplars around us. At the common ground, it suffices to say "dog"
> or draw a picture of the exemplar.

> One of the requirements for the common ground is that all the individuals
> should be cognitively similar enough. This resembles the requirement for
> sexual reproduction: the genomes should be similar enough, should be
> compatible.

Certainly, all communication requires some kind of common ground between
communicators (which in Dretske, 1981, called channel conditions in
Knowledge and the Flow of Information). It's not possible to question all
our background assumptions, or even to articulate them all explicitly. But,
what happens when some of our background assumptions are wrong?

In normal science, Kuhn pointed out that scientists tend not to question the
background theory so long as it keeps solving puzzles. But what happens
when normal science ceases to solves puzzles? What happens when science is
in crisis? According to Kuhn this leads to a breakdown in communication.

So, the interesting question is: How does our decision making improve when
our common ground breaks down? It is true that a new community of
communicators eventually develops a new common ground (a new paradigm). But
how do they do that?

> Anyway, consilience is involved with the pursuit and development of this
> common ground. Some initial examples that Malcolm gave were discoveries of
> the common ground between two previously separate theories.

A new theory, such as Einstein's theory of relativity establishes new
consiliences. For example, the Einsteinian prediction of the anomalous
precession of the perihelion of the planet Mercury connected that number to
the speed of light, whose value is determined in quite unrelated
experiments. But also, when theories change, some things stay the same.
New theories tend to preserve consiliences established by the old theory.
So, Einstein maintained the unification of celestial and terrestrial motion
established in Newton's theory. In fact, there is a quite general kind of
correspondence principle that shows that relativistic corrections to
Newtonian equations are usually quite small.

Following this line of thought, the discovery of new consiliences (and the
preservation of old ones) is the key to developing new common ground that
leads to more powerful and accurate decision making. More powerful and
accurate communication does not refer to the increasing the number of bits
of information (the channel capacity). This by itself cannot lead to more
successful decision making. It has to do with the quality of information,
not its quantity. That's why something along the lines of Dretske's
semantic notion of information married with the concept of consilience might
be the right way to go.

Malcolm

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Received on Mon Nov 22 08:26:18 2004