formal models and historical lessons
Some notes from a discussion with JonnyDeftone and SheepHerder.
- The key advantage of general laws is to keep the theories small, which simplifies inference for man and machine.
- Occam's razor has a metaphysical and an epistolmological interpretation: Either the universe loves simplicity or the simpler theory is easier to work with.
- Given that any interpretation requires bringing a pre-existant model to the data, which then has to be analogized to the context, the psychological experience of having learned something from the past might be a reaction to the fact that one has successfully subsumed two data sets under one model. Yet this case-based reasoning is a consequence of the process of interpretation, not a fundamental insight into the underlying patterns of history.
- History might be a teacher for life in the sense that the search for underlying patterns in historical incident teaches the critical skill of taking prior models and analogizing and adapting them to the past. Far from teaching the patterns, learning from history teaches the mental dexterity to do so effectively and efficiently.
- The generation of local models in historiography to explain, say, the history of prostitution in Southern France, is based on some component-like analogizing mash-up technique of interpretation that draws upon the prior experience of the historian.
- What is the relationship between psychologism and ontology formation?
- How does conceptual shift work representationally?
- What does the insight into the adaptive nature of model-application entail for a theory of case-based reasoning?