Re: "The map is not the Territory"...
From: Andr? Michaud (srp_at_microtec.net)
Date: 08/01/04
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Date: 1 Aug 2004 05:53:51 -0700
stephen@nomail.com wrote in message news:<cehr3s$22s3$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>...
> In sci.physics.relativity Andr? Michaud <srp@microtec.net> wrote:
> : stephen@nomail.com wrote in message news:<cebdgi$2qj3$1@msunews.cl.msu.edu>...
> :> In sci.physics.relativity Harry <harald.vanlintel@epfl.ch> wrote:
> :> : Very right!
> :> : Harald
> :>
> :> So is it possible to actually describe 'the Territory'?
> :> Are there any examples of this? Or is everything just a 'map'?
> :>
> :> Stephen
>
> : There are many examples.
>
> : Take Keppler's three laws, they were directly deduced from the
> : data that he and Copernicus (I think) gathered over decades
> : about the planets. They are a true and verifiable description
> : of the "territory".
>
> I think the OP would disagree. Do you think that Kepler's three
> laws cause the planets to follow the orbits they do?
Not at all. Kepler's laws only describe the observed behavior
of the planets, nothing more. Verifiable any time. True when he
wrote them down from his analysis of the data, true now and presumably
true any time in the future. A piece of the real territory as far
as we have been able to ascertain.
G is made from the third law which up to now proved to be (as far
as we have been able to ascertain) an exact reflection of the
real motion of planets on their orbits, if the third law was
eventually found not to be totally precise, then G would go
down the drain, and all of GR and Newton's theory the same, but
the planets would still be moving on their orbits. A modified
third law would then be set up to account for the better knowledge
we would have of the motion and a new gravitational theory based
on the modified third law would be set up.
> The repeated claim is that equations cannot cause anything, and
> Kepler's third law is just an equation.
His equation is only a description, but the motion of the planets
that is describe by the third law is just a fact of life, a piece
of the real territory. The motion of the planets determined Kepler's
third law, not the reverse.
The description is the map and the actual motion is the territory.
> I know there are people here you claim that we can never know
> the territory, and just describe maps.
Yes, quite a few.
> Others have a very preconceived notion about what the territory
> must look like.
Yes, quite a few also.
Each must draw his own conclusions.
Reading Korzybski helped me a lot to let go of preconceptions.
André Michaud
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