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From: YLIKOSKI@FINFUN.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.ai.digest
Subject: metaepistemology and unknowability
Message-ID: <19880724060148.1.NICK@HOWARD-JOHNSONS.LCS.MIT.EDU>
Date: 24 Jul 88 06:01:00 GMT
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Date: Thu, 21 Jul 88 15:19 EDT
From: YLIKOSKI%FINFUN.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
Subject:  metaepistemology and unknowability
To: AILIST@AI.AI.MIT.EDU
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In AIList Digest   V8 #9, David Chess <CHESS@ibm.com> writes:

>Can anyone complete the sentence "The actual world is unknowable to
>us, because we have only descriptions/representations of it, and not..."?

I may have misused the word "unknowable".  I'm applying a mechanistic
model of human thinking: it is an electrochemical process, neuron
activation patterns representing objects which one thinks of.  The
heart of the matter is if you can say a person or a robot *knows*
something if all it has is a representation, which may be right or
wrong, and there is no way for it to get absolute knowledge.  Well,
the philosophy of science has a lot to say about describing the
reality with a theory or a model.

Note that there are two kinds of models here.  The human brain
utilizes electrochemical, intracranial models without us being aware
of it; the philosophy of science involves written theories and
models which are easy to examine, manipulate and communicate.

I would say that the actual world is unknowable to us because we have
only descriptions of it, and not any kind of absolutely correct,
totally reliable information involving it.

>(I would tend to claim that "knowing" is just (roughly) "having
> the right kind of descriptions/representations of", and that
> there's no genuine "unknowability" here; but that's another
> debate...)

The unknowability here is uncertainty about the actual state of the
world very much in the same sense as scientific theories are theories,
not pure, absolute truths.


Andy Ylikoski