On May 9, 6:46 pm, Brent Meeker <meeke....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
>
> But according to your "map=territory" philosophy all these incompatible theories exist physically. What does that mean? All but one of them must describe some other universe and we just don't know which ones? Or do you mean they "exist physically" as representational tokens in the brains of physicists? They certainly don't exist like tables and chairs.
>
> Brent Meeker-
I shall try to clarify here., since this is a pretty bad mis-
understanding of what I've been saying.
Most of the time it's true that theories and reality are indeed two
different things. In this thread, Stathis gave some examples in which
I agreed that the theory was obviously *not* the reality. For
instance, in the case of the concept of an 'election', the terms there
are just human constructs used to simplify what was going on. And in
the case of for instance, observation of chimpanzees, 'laws of
chimpanzee behaviour' had no reality outside human conceptions as I
clearly agreed. So it's hard to see how it could came across to you
that I was arguing for such an obviously absurd premise that
map=territory always.
Only in the case of some highly peculiar concepts was I arguing this.
(namely certain non-reductionistic mathematical and abstract/
informational concepts). I was arguing that these concepts are the
exception to the general rule that map is not territory. ie I was
arguing that mathematical/certain informational concepts have a highly
peculiar nature which breaks the general rule. And then only in the
cases where we are dealing with a true/consistent theory.
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Received on Wed May 09 2007 - 03:38:39 PDT