Cognition and Measurement
from "Introduction to Objective Epistemology" http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Ob...
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All indications are that we did not begin counting on our ten fingers. Base-10, positional arithmetic, and all the rest are the result of a long and arduous journey of discovery and invention.
I should have known about the Wikipedia entry.
I have Denise Schmandt-Besserat's books.
We think in concepts to expand knowledge beyond the perceptual level. The hierarchy of concepts is based on perception. That has already been discussed in this thread. The thread links to the first chapter of Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which book cannot be ignored for this discussion, but is being replaced here by conventional academic slogans about "models".
Thinking in concepts is not the "model" mentality concocting mental images in parallel with a reality in which you can't ask "what is it", only imagine "models" that are somehow "useful" in "behavior". That is thoroughly Kantian, of the Pragmatist variety. It is not Objectivism. It is not and does not explain knowledge of the world, including science. Concepts are our means of grasping reality, not "modeling" it inside a subjective universe.
This could not be clearer in Objectivist epistemology (or Aristotle's), which shows what concepts are and how they are formed, in particular higher level abstract concepts. Ayn Rand's philosophy does not mean echoing Kant in the name of "reason". Rejecting the conventional bad epistemology does not mean denying man's nature and science, proclaimed in dramatic accusations employing floating abstractions with terminology stolen from Objectivism.
In engineering we created heuristic models all the time for systems that were too complex to analyze from first principles, but we were never confused that we were explaining how the system worked, we were just modeling it.
Unraveling the problem is not going to be done overnight especially because of the physics police who are worse that the PC speech police. But a good start would be to take Schrodinger's equation seriously and treat electrons etc as waves and not point particles.
To get there, he had to 'model' what he couldn't directly perceive with his senses, and from that 'model' invent both the means and the experiments to determine the 'cause' of the effect that he knew happened to him, and must exist by reason. There are countless examples of this throughout the history of mankind.
Einstein utilized 'mental models' exclusively to provide his theories that explained various phenomena that were effects of not directly observable causes. That led to a hundred years of examination, invention, and experiments to prove/disprove the predictions of those 'models', and countless improvements of mankind's understanding of the Universe. It's also pointed to many other things to be identified, conceptualized, 'modeled'/theorized, examined/experimented, invented, and knowledge of gained.
This is science. This is man's uniqueness over all other known life.
We don't perceive measurements, we perceive entities. A measurement is a relation between an entity and a unit regarded as a standard. You have to perceive entities and abstract their characteristics and relationships to be able to do that.
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