2 Oct
2024
2 Oct
'24
8:43 p.m.
Alex,
As I have said many times, in email notes, slides, and publications, a precise formal
ontology of everything cannot be done until all the unsolved problems in the foundations
of every science have been solved. That includes psychology (of humans and all other
living things on any planet in the universe).
But I do believe that it's possible and highly desirable to develop formal ontologies
of things that are implemented on digital computers. The reason why that's possible
is that anything implemented in strings of bits is discrete and finite. Therefore the
implementation itself is a formal definition of what the program does. And a formal
description in a more concise and readable form is possible and valuable..
I am happy to see that you are considering "the field of knowledge itself: education,
the learning process, and so on is of course very interesting as a branch of
Psychology."
Nothing in any of those topics can be formalized precisely because every one of them has
an enormous number of unknown issues for which the best known studies are incomplete. I
have a high respect for what has been done in those fields. But every research issue they
solve opens up many, many more unsolved problems.
Attempts at formalization can be useful in order to show the vast realm of unknown and
unknowable issues that make any formal theories of everything hopeless.
Re: " they stopped classifying objectives and moved on to classifying mental
abilities themselves."
That seems to be a step toward recognizing the immense scope of the problem. But
it's essential to make the distinction between the formal representation of what is
computable and the unknown and poorly understood continuum of the mind and the world.
The discrete can be formalized, but it's impossible to formalize the continuum in any
finite notation with a discrete set of symbols.
Engineers have an excellent way of summarizing these issues: "All theories are
wrong, but some are useful."
John
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From: "Alex Shkotin" <alex.shkotin(a)gmail.com>
Hi Ali,
You still haven't sent us which version of BT you're working with. But between the
first in 50s and the second in 90s versions, an important change occurred: they stopped
classifying objectives and moved on to classifying mental abilities themselves. I'll
take a look tomorrow, because the field of knowledge itself: education, the learning
process, and so on is of course very interesting as a branch of Psychology.
Alex