Re: [Fis] Quantum infoRe: [Fis] Quantum info
From: John Collier <collierj@ukzn.ac.za>
Date: Wed 21 Jun 2006 - 16:37:54 CEST At 02:40 PM 2006/06/21, Arne Kjellman wrote: The realist�s riddle and the Foundations of Information Science<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /> Arne, colleagues, I don't think that this is an argument for antirealism, but for skepticism. At least it can be made out that way, so there is another alternative. The choice is not between just either we can check our representations against the external world or we only have constructions (or models) to rely on, but also we can hold our models to be falsifiable, and withhold final judgement (this was Hume's route). This position has a very old argument in its favour. The constructivist deviation is very recent. The problem with it is that our models may contain information about the outside world, so to dismiss them as not having that, and judging reality only on our models is equally unjustified and misleading. There is an argument known to the Greeks, called the Diallelus (the wheel). There is a discussion of it in Nicholas Rescher, Methodological Pragmatism, New York University Press (1977) pp. 15-18. The basic idea is that we have a means of judging truth, or at least acceptability. Call it C. C can be any method you like, simple or complex; it does not matter to the argument. Now we ask if C is justified. Either the justification is in terms of C, which is circular, or in terms of some C', different from C. If the latter, we need to ask (if we did at first for C), is C' justified? Then we are back on the wheel, and so on. Your argument, Arne, can be put in these terms: Let O be the truth, and C be our perceptual apparatus; then we can know O only through C, but what validates C? We are on the wheel, not on the route to taking models to be the essence of reality. This can be seen easily. Suppose that we have a criterion C for judging if our models are acceptable. What justifies C? We are back on the wheel. I see no advantage in retreating to models as the epistemic ground, and it smacks of a sort of verificationism to me. In any case, it adds an epicycle to the problem that can be dealt with just by acknowledging that perceptual apparatus and models are part of the information we have, and we need to be sceptical about whether we are dealing with information from the world or from our C in this case. Then we can get down to the business of trying to figure out how to distinguish the two classes of information (externally originated and internally originated). The first step, I think, is to deny that we have any evidence that there are things in themselves out there; we cannot, by postulation, have information about them, only information transferred from them through an information channel, which invariably adds noise, some nonrandom. So at best we have access to information that forms patterns, some perhaps real and objective, other parts artefactual. Is there a criterion for distinguishing artefactuality from reality? Certainly not some C that is infallible, or we are on the wheel, but there might be criteria that work fairly well as long as we don't get all paranoid about certainty. In traditional science, invariance under transformations of models has been an important criterion (Galileo, Einstein), but certainly not the only one. It seems to me that it can be applied to QM through a structuralist approach to QM. I don't expect that this will move committed inernalists, constructivists, antirealists and antimodernists (it's too early or impossible to know what postmodernism would be -- see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Harvard UP, http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/LATWEH.html). I colleague of mine, antirealist historian -- Maggie Osler, remarked before examining a realist MA thesis with me, that she thought that being a realist or antirealist was genetically determined, or at least innate. She may have been right. In any case, the same problem of finding invariances applies to the antirealist -- they are of great scientific interest for whatever reason, but it is harder to justify. As I have mentioned previously, a number of us are producing a book What's wrong with things?: Information-theoretic ontic structural realism, that addresses QM this way, among other subjects. If anybody would like to read and comment on the manuscript, please get in touch with me. It is in revision right now, but any input we can get from this esteemed group would be valuable. This book relies on Peirce for one major premise, but does not investigate Peircean semiotics, which I think is required for a more complete answer to Arne's question of a way out of the dilemma. Cheers, John "The agility of the tongue is shown in its insisting that the world depends upon it." Charles Peirce CP 8.83 (1891). Prof John Collier collierj@ukzn.ac.za +27 31 260 3248 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Please find our disclaimer at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/disclaimer -------------------------------------------------------------------- <<<
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