Representation is a concept we find at the intersection of cybernetics, epistemology, logic, mathematics, psychology, and sociology. In my studies it led me from math to psych and back again, with sidelong glances at the history of democratic governance. Its time come round again, I find myself returning to the scenes of two recurring questions.
Scene 1. Pragmatic Truth • Discussion 18
We do not live in axiom systems. We do not live encased in languages, formal or natural. There is no reason to think we will ever have exact and exhaustive theories of what’s out there, and the truth, as we know, is “out there”. Peirce understood there are more truths in mathematics than are dreamt of in logic — and Gödel’s realism should have put the last nail in the coffin of logicism — but some ways of thinking just never get a clue.
That brings us to Question 1 —
- What are formalisms and all their embodiments in brains and computers good for?
Scene 2. Theory and Therapy of Representations • 1
Statistics were originally the data a ship of state needed for stationkeeping and staying on course. The Founders of the United States, like the Cybernauts of the Enlightenment they were, engineered a ship of state with checks and balances and error-controlled feedbacks for the sake of representing both reality and the will of the people. In that connection Max Weber saw how a state’s accounting systems are intended as representations of realities its crew and passengers must observe or perish.
That brings us to Question 2 —
- What are the forces distorting our representations of what’s observed, what’s expected, and what’s intended?
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cc: Conceptual Graphs • Cybernetics • Laws of Form • Ontolog Forum
cc: FB | Cybernetics • Structural Modeling • Systems Science
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Question 2 put me in mind of this quotation:
I wonder why a man should prefer a good billiard-table to a poor one; and why he should prefer straight cues to crooked ones; and why he should prefer round balls to chipped ones; and why he should prefer a level table to one that slants; and why he should prefer responsive cushions to the dull and unresponsive kind. I wonder at these things, because when we examine the matter we find that the essentials involved in billiards are as competently and exhaustively furnished by a bad billiard outfit as they are by the best one. One of the essentials is amusement. Very well, if there is any more amusement to be gotten out of the one outfit than out of the other, the facts are in favor of the bad outfit. The bad outfit will always furnish thirty per cent. more fun for the players and for the spectators than will the good outfit. Another essential of the game is that the outfit shall give the players full opportunity to exercise their best skill, and display it in a way to compel the admiration of the spectators. Very well, the bad outfit is nothing behind the good one in this regard. It is a difficult matter to estimate correctly the eccentricities of chipped balls and a slanting table, and make the right allowance for them and secure a count; the finest kind of skill is required to accomplish the satisfactory result. Another essential of the game is that it shall add to the interest of the game by furnishing opportunities to bet. Very well, in this regard no good outfit can claim any advantage over a bad one. I know, by experience, that a bad outfit is as valuable as the best one; that an outfit that couldn’t be sold at auction for seven dollars is just as valuable for all the essentials of the game as an outfit that is worth a thousand. … Last winter, here in New York, I saw Hoppe and Schaefer and Sutton and the three or four other billiard champions of world-wide fame contend against each other, and certainly the art and science displayed were a wonder to see; yet I saw nothing there in the way of science and art that was more wonderful than shots which I had seen Texas Tom make on the wavy surface of that poor old wreck in the perishing saloon at Jackass Gulch forty years before.
– Mark Twain’s Autobiography, Volume 2 (2013)
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