[Fis] "The Travellers"

Wed Oct 29 16:35:46 CET 2014

Dear Pedro and FIS Colleagues,

For me it was amazing time to read exchanges about "The travelers" !
I was silent because for me is was stimulus brain storming discussion.
I received a plenty of influences.

Only one aspect there was not commented and let me now to this.

For this purpose I will use a remarkable text from:
[ Frege G. An extract from an undated letter, published in Frege's Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence (ed.) Gottfried Gabriel, Hans Hermes. Friedrich Kanbartel. Christian Thiel, and Albert Veraart, Abridged for the English (edn.), by Brian MeGuinness, and Trans. Hans Kaal (Oxford: Blackwell. 1980), http://mind.ucsd.edu/syllabi/00-01/phil235/a_readings/frege_jourdain.html (accessed: 15.11.2012) ].:

In a letter written to Philip Jourdain in 1914, Gottlob Frege had written:

"
Let us suppose an explorer travelling in an unexplored country sees a high snow-capped mountain on the northern horizon.
By making inquiries among the natives he learns that its name is 'Aphla'. By sighting it from different points he determines its position as exactly as possible, enters it in a map, and writes in his diary: 'Aphla is at least 5000 meters high'.
Another explorer sees a snow-capped mountain on the southern horizon and learns that it is called Ateb. He enters it in his map under this name.
Later comparison shows that both explorers saw the same mountain. Now the content of the proposition 'Ateb is Aphla' is far from being a mere consequence of the principle of identity, but contains a valuable piece of geographical knowledge. What is stated in the proposition 'Ateb is Aphla' is certainly not the same thing as the content of the proposition 'Ateb is Ateb'.
Now if what corresponded to the name 'Aphla' as part of the thought was the reference of the name and hence the mountain itself, then this would be the same in both thoughts. The thought expressed in the proposition 'Ateb is Aphla' would have to coincide with the one in 'Ateb is Ateb', which is far from being the case. What corresponds to the name 'Ateb' as part of the thought must therefore be different from what corresponds to the name 'Aphla' as part of the thought. This cannot therefore be the reference which is the same for both names, but must be something which is different in the two cases, and I say accordingly that the sense of the name 'Ateb' is different from the sense of the name 'Aphla'.
Accordingly, the sense of the proposition 'Ateb is at least 5000 meters high' is also different from the sense of the proposition 'Aphla is at least 5000 meters high'. Someone who takes the latter to be true need not therefore take the former to be true. An object can be determined in different ways, and every one of these ways of determining it can give rise to a special name, and these different names then have different senses; for it is not self-evident that it is the same object which is being determined in different ways.
We find this in astronomy in the case of planetoids and comets. Now if the sense of a name was something subjective, then the sense of the proposition in which the name occurs, and hence the thought, would also be something subjective, and the thought one man connects with this proposition would be different from the thought another man connects with it; a common store of thoughts, a common science would be impossible.
It would be impossible for something one man said to contradict what another man said, because the two would not express the same thought at all, but each his owns.
For these reasons I believe that the sense of a name is not something subjective (crossed out: in one's mental life), that it does not therefore belong to psychology, and that it is indispensable.
“

What is important in this example is :
-    The names Ateb and Aphla refer to different parts of the same natural object (mountain);
-    The position of the referred object (mountain) is fixed by any artificial system (geographical co-ordinates) which is another knowledge about the same object;
-    The names correspond one to another and both to the real object but without the explorers’ maps and diaries, it is impossible to restore the correspondence.

In conclusion, let me remark that we really need “knowledge maps” to understand each other “travelling in an unexplored reality”.
Such knowledge maps usually are called “General Theories”.

Friendly regards
Krassimir

-----Original Message----- 
From: Pedro C. Marijuan 
Sent: Wednesday, October 29, 2014 3:45 PM 
To: fis at listas.unizar.es 
Subject: Re: [Fis] "The Travellers" 

Dear FIS colleagues,

Quite interesting exchanges, really. The discussion reminds me the times 
when behaviorism and ethology were at odds on how to focus the study of 
human/animal behavior. (Maybe I already talked about that some months 
ago.) On the one side, a rigorous theory and a strongly reductionist 
point of view were advanced --about learning, conditioned & 
unconditioned stimuli, responses, observation standards, laboratory 
exclusive scenario, etc. On the other side, it was observing behavior in 
nature, approaching without preconceptions and tentatively 
characterizing the situations and results; it was the naturalistic 
strategy, apprehending from nature before forming any theoretical scheme 
(of course, later on Tinbergen, Lorenz, Eibl-Eibestfeldt, etc. were to 
develop ad hoc theoretical schemes).

How can we develop a theory on signals without the previous naturalistic 
approach to the involved phenomena? Particularly when the panorama has 
dramatically changed after the information-biomolecular revolution. We 
have a rich background of cellular signaling systems, both prokaryotic 
and eukaryotic, to explore and cohere. We have important neuroscientific 
ideas (although not so well developed). We have social physics and 
social networks approaches to the social dynamics of information. We 
should travel to all of those camps, not to stay there, but to advance a 
soft all-encompassing perspective, later on to be confronted with the 
new ideas from physics too. The intertwining between self-production and 
communication is a promising general aspect to explore, in my opinion... 
socially and biologically it makes a lot of sense.

Semiotics could be OK for the previous generation--something attuned to 
our scientific times is needed now.

best ---Pedro

-------------------------------------------------
Pedro C. Marijuán
Grupo de Bioinformación / Bioinformation Group
Instituto Aragonés de Ciencias de la Salud
Centro de Investigación Biomédica de Aragón (CIBA)
Avda. San Juan Bosco, 13, planta X
50009 Zaragoza, Spain
Tfno. +34 976 71 3526 (& 6818)
pcmarijuan.iacs at aragon.es
http://sites.google.com/site/pedrocmarijuan/
-------------------------------------------------

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