Newsgroups: comp.ai
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!violet.waterloo.edu!cpshelley
From: cpshelley@violet.waterloo.edu (cameron shelley)
Subject: Re: UNIFIED MODEL FOR KNOWLEDGE REPRESENTATION? (IMPOSSIBLE
Message-ID: <1991Jun11.215224.17651@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Sender: news@watdragon.waterloo.edu (News Owner)
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <9106110020.AA17886@lilac.berkeley.edu> <133090@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu>
Date: Tue, 11 Jun 1991 21:52:24 GMT
Lines: 39

In article <133090@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> byland@iris.cis.ohio-state.edu (Tom Bylander) writes:
[...]
>I agree that "perceptions" are not completely objective, but if they
>did not deliver some element of truth, then a lot of things become
>hard to explain.  How do humans and other animals with sophisticated
>sensors survive if their perceptions do not provide appropriate
>information about the world, i.e., something true about the world?
>Are scientific arguments about cold fusion, ozone depletion, dinosaur
>extinction, cholesterol, and so on merely sociological?

Actually, I think the question (to which I responded before) has not
so much to do with efficacy of perceptual capabilities so much as our
compulsion to interpret what we perceive.  This is further compounded
by our subsequent encoding of information for communication to others.

I believe it is reasonable to assume that our perceptual capabilities
are evolved to help achieve behavioural success, and when dealing with
'everyday' physical data we have little to gain from adopting particular
political viewpoints.  On the other hand, the original poster seemed
more interested in events which are politically charged (ie. perceived
in a social context), and filtering "truth" from ideology is unlikely
to get far.  This is especially true of reports of the motives of other
people and the social effects of their actions.

>I think a more reasonable position is that perceptions provide
>evidence about many aspects of the world, and that the quality of our
>assertions about the world depends on the quality of the evidence that
>supports them.

Again, the subject really wasn't the quality of our perceptions, but
that our method of communication contians biases which affect the content
of messages.  I would point out also that most scientific arguments
deal with what generally happens (distributions), not about a narrowly
"truthful" account of any individual event.  At that point, communication
systems like mathematics (with biases we've all been trained to accept)
are used, rather than natural language monologs.

				Cam