I am working on a new approach to epistemology—essentially an extension of Frege’s context principle—that explains the nature of meaning and existence. I am finding that it provides traction on many problems in epistemology, linguistics, rationality and philosophy in general. I also believe that it provides traction on problems in more practical fields like physics and computer science.
I think that my approach to epistemology is pretty cool, that it is essentially a “Theory of Everything”; however epistemology is not my field of training or experience—and it seems that nothing is really “new”—so I am researching the literature. And yes I suppose that you can say there is related literature, in that essentially all literature in some sense explores meaning. I am reading related material in Buddhism, philosophy, ethics, epistemology, linguistics, semiotics, logic, theory of computation, mathematics, and physics. Much of this material is steeped in domain specific language; to even understand the abstract of many papers I need a deep background in the topic. My only real hope is to thread my way through this material looking for key concepts—restricting my detailed analysis to sources that effectively add to my network of knowledge.
The research is paying off. My original topic of research was loosely “meaning is context dependent”. Certainly this idea is well represented in the literature; there are forms of contextualism in ethics, logic, mathematics, epistemology, and linguistics. There are related philosophies like relativism, pluralism, perspectivism and nihilism. Although contextualism in these fields is clearly a contender for explaining the nature of truth and meaning, there are also valid criticisms of it. It is clear that the traditional approaches to contextualism are flawed; and yet I still believe that the core idea is valid.
I still have much more work to do, but I believe that I have found an approach to contextualism that fixes its traditional failings; but since this approach is potentially (relatively) novel I now need to worry about my intellectual property agreement with my employer. This is an unfortunate barrier to my progress. To verify and extend my ideas I need to expose them to public evaluation and criticism—but my company has a broad definition of intellectual property and insists that I go through their invention disclosure process—seeking permission to publish from them; permission that they will only grant if they are convinced it is in their interest.
This sounds very interesting, both philosophically and from a computer science perspective. If there is any more material I could read, please let me know, publicly or privately.
Read Martin Ward’s Language Oriented Programming (1995). You will be interested in the idea of having domain experts designing languages instead of programmers. The key take-away from this paper is the idea of using domain specific languages to achieve the separation of concerns.
Charles Simonyi’s intentional programming contains a key related idea—stop thinking about code as text, think about it as an interface.
If you can imagine a world full domain specific languages designed by domain experts, where the languages are not text and where programming is all about the process of integrating cross-cutting concerns, then you will start to see the future of software as I do.
Related to philosophy and epistemology:
I am a neophyte in this field, so any claim I make may be wrong. I am also still just scratching the surface with my research—every day I find new threads that I need to follow to build my network of knowledge—as a result I don’t have a nice concise list of references to provide you.
My starting thesis was that context creates meaning and in its absence there is no meaning; domains can only be connected if they have contexts in common. Common contexts provide shared meaning and open a path for communication between disparate domains. I have been calling this the context principle.
There is plenty of prior art in the literature for this position, generally known as or associated with contextualism—although it appears under other guises as well. I have a new formulation of this thesis which I think adequately addresses the traditional criticisms of contextualism; but as I mentioned, for now I feel constrained to reserve it.
For the purpose of this response I think I can stick to my original thesis, and to other material found abundantly within the literature.
Gottlob Frege originally coined the term context principle in his Foundations of Arithmetic, 1884 (translated). He stated it as “We must never try to define the meaning of a word in isolation, but only as it is used in the context of a proposition.” Although I believe that my definition for this term gets at the essence of Frege’s usage, I don’t claim that it matches his intent.
Frege’s definition has two problems; it attributes meaning to usage and it posits that a proposition is a context that can provide that meaning. These perspectives are prevalent even in contemporary literature and have resulted in weak forms of contextualism.
Attributing meaning to usage might imply that it is the intent of the speaker that sets the meaning of a message. It is as if meaning floats along with the message to be absorbed by the receptive listener. In fact the meaning of the message can only be found within the speaker as he creates (encodes) it, and within the listener as he decodes it. The meaning that the speaker attempted to encode into the message may be very different than the meaning that the listener obtained from decoding it; each action is performed exclusively from the context of their unique perspectives.
In my version of the context principle, the context that creates meaning is always a “mind” in some sense. It isn’t the proposition that sets a context for meaning, but a person’s understanding of that proposition when they decode the related message.
This idea is expressed by Charles Sanders Peirce (as found here):
Even when a sign represents by a resemblance or factual connection independent of interpretation, the sign is a sign only insofar as it is at least potentially interpretable by a mind and insofar as the sign is a determination of a mind or at least a quasi-mind, that which functions as if it were a mind, for example in crystals and the work of bees...
...
Admitting that connected Signs must have a Quasi-mind, it may further be declared that there can be no isolated sign. Moreover, signs require at least two Quasi-minds; a Quasi-utterer and a Quasi-interpreter; and although these two are at one (i.e., are one mind) in the sign itself, they must nevertheless be distinct. In the Sign they are, so to say, welded. Accordingly, it is not merely a fact of human Psychology, but a necessity of Logic, that every logical evolution of thought should be dialogic.
...
He held that “all this universe is perfused with signs, if it is not composed exclusively of signs”.
He believed that in some sense these quasi-minds permeate our reality, and that all meaning is formed through a process of inference.
In this discussion I am having with the user TheOtherDave I refer to this as a “chain of inference”.
My claim is that the meaning we attribute to something depends entirely on this chain of inference and does not exist independently of it. We don’t evaluate reality directly, we evaluate our observations of reality; this is a process with layers of interpretation.
For example, we don’t observe a squirrel directly; we observe photons that have interacted with the squirrel. Actually our “observation” of a squirrel is the result of a chain of inference performed by our brain in response to the sensory input—based on our prior experience.
Squirrels do not exist outside of our mind. I am not arguing for solipsism, I am arguing that the human mind is the only context that the squirrel abstraction has a meaning within. The stuff that makes up a squirrel certainly has existence within our common context of physical reality; but I’m sure that physical reality holds no meaning for that stuff in a way that is equivalent to our “squirrel” abstraction.
From this perspective constructivist epistemology is more valid than scientific realism—although I would not strictly adopt one perspective over the other. Mathematics, atoms and quantum mechanics are abstractions that exist from certain perspectives, but it would be false to claim that they exist in any absolute sense.
I am working on a new approach to epistemology—essentially an extension of Frege’s context principle—that explains the nature of meaning and existence. I am finding that it provides traction on many problems in epistemology, linguistics, rationality and philosophy in general. I also believe that it provides traction on problems in more practical fields like physics and computer science.
I think that my approach to epistemology is pretty cool, that it is essentially a “Theory of Everything”; however epistemology is not my field of training or experience—and it seems that nothing is really “new”—so I am researching the literature. And yes I suppose that you can say there is related literature, in that essentially all literature in some sense explores meaning. I am reading related material in Buddhism, philosophy, ethics, epistemology, linguistics, semiotics, logic, theory of computation, mathematics, and physics. Much of this material is steeped in domain specific language; to even understand the abstract of many papers I need a deep background in the topic. My only real hope is to thread my way through this material looking for key concepts—restricting my detailed analysis to sources that effectively add to my network of knowledge.
The research is paying off. My original topic of research was loosely “meaning is context dependent”. Certainly this idea is well represented in the literature; there are forms of contextualism in ethics, logic, mathematics, epistemology, and linguistics. There are related philosophies like relativism, pluralism, perspectivism and nihilism. Although contextualism in these fields is clearly a contender for explaining the nature of truth and meaning, there are also valid criticisms of it. It is clear that the traditional approaches to contextualism are flawed; and yet I still believe that the core idea is valid.
I still have much more work to do, but I believe that I have found an approach to contextualism that fixes its traditional failings; but since this approach is potentially (relatively) novel I now need to worry about my intellectual property agreement with my employer. This is an unfortunate barrier to my progress. To verify and extend my ideas I need to expose them to public evaluation and criticism—but my company has a broad definition of intellectual property and insists that I go through their invention disclosure process—seeking permission to publish from them; permission that they will only grant if they are convinced it is in their interest.
This sounds very interesting, both philosophically and from a computer science perspective. If there is any more material I could read, please let me know, publicly or privately.
Related to computer science:
Read Martin Ward’s Language Oriented Programming (1995). You will be interested in the idea of having domain experts designing languages instead of programmers. The key take-away from this paper is the idea of using domain specific languages to achieve the separation of concerns.
Charles Simonyi’s intentional programming contains a key related idea—stop thinking about code as text, think about it as an interface.
Aspect-oriented programming contains the key idea of cross-cutting concerns.
If you can imagine a world full domain specific languages designed by domain experts, where the languages are not text and where programming is all about the process of integrating cross-cutting concerns, then you will start to see the future of software as I do.
Related to philosophy and epistemology:
I am a neophyte in this field, so any claim I make may be wrong. I am also still just scratching the surface with my research—every day I find new threads that I need to follow to build my network of knowledge—as a result I don’t have a nice concise list of references to provide you.
My starting thesis was that context creates meaning and in its absence there is no meaning; domains can only be connected if they have contexts in common. Common contexts provide shared meaning and open a path for communication between disparate domains. I have been calling this the context principle.
There is plenty of prior art in the literature for this position, generally known as or associated with contextualism—although it appears under other guises as well. I have a new formulation of this thesis which I think adequately addresses the traditional criticisms of contextualism; but as I mentioned, for now I feel constrained to reserve it.
For the purpose of this response I think I can stick to my original thesis, and to other material found abundantly within the literature.
Gottlob Frege originally coined the term context principle in his Foundations of Arithmetic, 1884 (translated). He stated it as “We must never try to define the meaning of a word in isolation, but only as it is used in the context of a proposition.” Although I believe that my definition for this term gets at the essence of Frege’s usage, I don’t claim that it matches his intent.
Frege’s definition has two problems; it attributes meaning to usage and it posits that a proposition is a context that can provide that meaning. These perspectives are prevalent even in contemporary literature and have resulted in weak forms of contextualism.
Attributing meaning to usage might imply that it is the intent of the speaker that sets the meaning of a message. It is as if meaning floats along with the message to be absorbed by the receptive listener. In fact the meaning of the message can only be found within the speaker as he creates (encodes) it, and within the listener as he decodes it. The meaning that the speaker attempted to encode into the message may be very different than the meaning that the listener obtained from decoding it; each action is performed exclusively from the context of their unique perspectives.
In my version of the context principle, the context that creates meaning is always a “mind” in some sense. It isn’t the proposition that sets a context for meaning, but a person’s understanding of that proposition when they decode the related message.
This idea is expressed by Charles Sanders Peirce (as found here):
...
...
He believed that in some sense these quasi-minds permeate our reality, and that all meaning is formed through a process of inference.
In this discussion I am having with the user TheOtherDave I refer to this as a “chain of inference”.
My claim is that the meaning we attribute to something depends entirely on this chain of inference and does not exist independently of it. We don’t evaluate reality directly, we evaluate our observations of reality; this is a process with layers of interpretation.
For example, we don’t observe a squirrel directly; we observe photons that have interacted with the squirrel. Actually our “observation” of a squirrel is the result of a chain of inference performed by our brain in response to the sensory input—based on our prior experience.
Squirrels do not exist outside of our mind. I am not arguing for solipsism, I am arguing that the human mind is the only context that the squirrel abstraction has a meaning within. The stuff that makes up a squirrel certainly has existence within our common context of physical reality; but I’m sure that physical reality holds no meaning for that stuff in a way that is equivalent to our “squirrel” abstraction.
From this perspective constructivist epistemology is more valid than scientific realism—although I would not strictly adopt one perspective over the other. Mathematics, atoms and quantum mechanics are abstractions that exist from certain perspectives, but it would be false to claim that they exist in any absolute sense.