"[…] there is an external world which can in principle be exhaustively described in scientific language. The scientist, as both observer and language-user, can capture the external facts of the world in propositions that are true if they correspond to the facts and false if they do not. Science is ideally a linguistic system in which true propositions are in one-to-one relation to facts, including facts that are not directly observed because they involve hidden entities or properties, or past events or far distant events. These hidden events are described in theories, and theories can be inferred from observation, that is, the hidden explanatory mechanism of the world can be discovered from what is open to observation. Man as scientist is regarded as standing apart from the world and able to experiment and theorize about it objectively and dispassionately." (Mary B Hesse, "Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science", 1980)
"Concepts are inventions of the human mind used to construct a model of the world. They package reality into discrete units for further processing, they support powerful mechanisms for doing logic, and they are indispensable for precise, extended chains of reasoning. […] A mental model is a cognitive construct that describes a person's understanding of a particular content domain in the world." (John Sown, "Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine", 1984)
"Every system of whatever size must maintain its own structure and must deal with a dynamic environment, i.e., the system must strike a proper balance between stability and change. The cybernetic mechanisms for stability (i.e., homeostasis, negative feedback, autopoiesis, equifinality) and change (i.e., positive feedback, algedonodes, self-organization) are found in all viable systems." (Barry Clemson, "Cybernetics: A New Management Tool", 1984)
"How can we dare to predict the behavior of man? We may predict the movements of a machine, of an automaton; more than this, we many even try to predict the mechanisms or 'dynamisms' of the human psyche as well. But man is more than psyche." (Viktor E Frankl, "Man's Search for Meaning", 1984)
"It is actually impossible in theory to determine exactly what the hidden mechanism is without opening the box, since there are always many different mechanisms with identical behavior. Quite apart from this, analysis is more difficult than invention in the sense in which, generally, induction takes more time to perform than deduction: in induction one has to search for the way, whereas in deduction one follows a straightforward path." (Valentino Braitenberg, "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology", 1984)
"We define a semantic network as 'the collection of all the relationships that concepts have to other concepts, to percepts, to procedures, and to motor mechanisms' of the knowledge." (John F Sowa, "Conceptual Structures", 1984)
"Mental models are the mechanisms whereby humans are able to generate descriptions of system purpose and form, explanations of system functioning and observed system states, and predictions of future system states." (William B Rouse & Nancy M Morris, "On looking into the black box: Prospects and limits in the search for mental models", Psychological Bulletin (3), 1986)
"Physicists are all too apt to look for the wrong sorts of generalizations, to concoct theoretical models that are too neat, too powerful, and too clean. Not surprisingly, these seldom fit well with data. To produce a really good biological theory, one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could build on what was already there." (Francis H C Crick,"What Mad Pursuit?: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery", 1988)
"Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it." (Isaac Asimov, [Interview by Bill Moyers] 1988)
"[...] to acknowledge the subjectivity inherent in the interpretation of data is to recognize the central role of statistical analysis as a formal mechanism by which new evidence can be integrated with existing knowledge. Such a view of statistics as a dynamic discipline is far from the common perception of a rather dry, automatic technology for processing data." (Donald A Berry, "Statistical Analysis and the Illusion of Objectivity", American Scientist Vol. 76, 1988)
"In cybernetics a system is normally described as a black box whereby the whole of a system's generative mechanisms are lumped into a single transfer function (TF). This acts on an input to produce an output. To ensure that the output is monitored, so that a system may remain homeostatic (the critical variables remain within acceptable limits) or attain a new steady state (according to input decisions, say), the output of the TF is brought back into its input where the difference between the desired and actual levels is identified. This is known as feedback." (Robert L Flood & Ewart R Carson, "Dealing with Complexity: An introduction to the theory and application of systems", 1988)
"Man's attempts to control, service, and/ or design very complex situations have, however, often been fraught with disaster. A major contributory factor has been the unwitting adoption of piecemeal thinking, which sees only parts of a situation and its generative mechanisms. Additionally, it has been suggested that nonrational thinking sees only the extremes (the simple 'solutions' ) of any range of problem solutions. The net result of these factors is that situations exhibit counterintuitive behavior; outcomes of situations are rarely as we expect, but this is not an intrinsic property of situations; rather, it is largely caused by neglect of, or lack of respect being paid to, the nature and complexity of a situation under investigation." (Robert L Flood & Ewart R Carson, "Dealing with Complexity: An introduction to the theory and application of systems", 1988)
"Negative feedback only improves the precision of goal-seeking, but does not determine it. Feedback devices are only executive mechanisms that operate during the translation of a program." (Ernst Mayr, "Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist", 1988)
"Physicists are all too apt to look for the wrong sorts of generalizations, to concoct theoretical models that are too neat, too powerful, and too clean. Not surprisingly, these seldom fi t well with data. To produce a really good biological theory, one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could build on what was already there." (Francis H C Crick, "What Mad Pursuit?: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery", 1988)
"Science doesn't purvey absolute truth. Science is a mechanism. It's a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature. It's a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match. And this works, not just for the ordinary aspects of science, but for all of life. I should think people would want to know that what they know is truly what the universe is like, or at least as close as they can get to it." (Isaac Asimov, [Interview by Bill Moyers] 1988)
"[...] engineering is physics applied to structures and machines. They and chemistry are the sciences that biologists need to explain the structure and mechanism of living things." (R McNeill Alexander, "Dynamics of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Giants", 1989)
"Model is used as a theory. It becomes theory when the purpose of building a model is to understand the mechanisms involved in the developmental process. Hence as theory, model does not carve up or change the world, but it explains how change takes place and in what way or manner. This leads to build change in the structures." (Laxmi K Patnaik, "Model Building in Political Science", The Indian Journal of Political Science Vol. 50 (2), 1989)
"Physics is the basic science of matter and energy, and engineering is physics applied to structures and machines. They and chemistry are the sciences that biologists need to explain the structure and mechanism of living things." (R McNeill Alexander, "Dynamics of Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Giants", 1989)
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