Participating in the Meaning of Life, a Contributor’s Critique

The aim of this contribution is to critically examine the metaphysical presuppositions that prevail in (Stewart in Found Sci 15(4):395–409, 2010a) answer to the question “are we in the midst of a developmental process?” as expressed in his statement “that humanity has discovered the trajectory of past evolution and can see how it is likely to continue in the future”.     

Must Complex Systems Theory Be Materialistic?

So far, the sciences of complexity have received less attention from philosophers than from scientists. Responding to Salthe’s (Found Sci 15, 4(6):357–367, 2010a) model of evolution, I focus on its metaphysical implications, asking whether the implications of his canonical developmental trajectory (CDT) must be materialistic as his reading proposes.     

Friends of Wisdom?

This commentary addresses the question of the meaning of critique in relation to objectivism or dogmatism. Inspired by Kant’s critical philosophy and Husserl’s phenomenology, it defines the first in terms of conditionality, the second in terms of oppositionality. It works out an application on the basis of Salthe’s (Found Sci 15 4(6):357–367, 2010a) paper on development and evolution, where competition is criticized in oppositional, more than in conditional terms.     

Scale Relativity: an Extended Paradigm for Physics and Biology?

With scale relativity theory, Laurent Nottale has provided a powerful conceptual and mathematical framework with numerous validated predictions that has fundamental implications and applications for all sciences. We discuss how this extended framework reviewed in Nottale (Found Sci 152 (3):101–152, 2010a) may help facilitating integration across multiple size and time frames in systems biology, and the development of a scale relative biology with increased explanatory power.     

Symmetries and Symmetry-Breakings: The Fabric of Physical Interactions and the Flow of Time

This short note develops some ideas along the lines of the stimulating paper by Heylighen (Found Sci 15 4(3):345–356, 2010a). It summarizes a theme in several writings with Francis Bailly, downloadable from this author’s web page. The “geometrization” of time and causality is the common ground of the analysis hinted here and in Heylighen’s paper. Heylighen adds a logical notion, consistency, in order to understand a possible origin of the selective process that may have originated this organization of natural phenomena. We will join our perspectives by hinting to some gnoseological complexes, common to mathematics and physics, which may shed light on the issues raised by Heylighen.     

The Future of Life and What it Means for Humanity

Vidal’s (Found Sci, 2010) and Rottiers’s (Found Sci, 2010) commentaries on my (2010) paper raised a number of important issues about the possible future trajectory of evolution and its implications for humanity. My response emphasizes that despite the inherent uncertainty involved in extrapolating the trajectory of evolution into the far future, the possibilities it reveals nonetheless have significant strategic implications for what we do with our lives here and now, individually and collectively. One important implication is the replacement of postmodern scepticism and relativism with an evolutionary grand narrative that can guide humanity to participate successfully in the future evolution of life in the universe.     

Competing Definitions of Information Versus Entropy in Physics

As was mentioned by Nicolas Lori in his (Found Sci, 2010) commentary, the definition of Information in Physics is something about which not all authors agreed. According to physicists like me Information decreases when Entropy increases (so entropy would be a negative measure of information), while many physicists, seemingly the majority of them, are convinced of the contrary (even in the camp of Quantum Information Theoreticians). In this reply I reproduce, and make more precise, some of my arguments, that appeared here and there in my (2010) paper, in order to clarify the presentation of my personal point of view on the subject.     

Embracing the Political in Technology and Transition Studies: A Response to Philip Vergragt and Bram Bos

This article is a short reaction to the comments of Vergragt (Found Sci, 2012) and Bos (Found Sci, 2012) on my article “Sustainability transition and the nature of technology” (Paredis in Found Sci 16(2–3):195–225, Paredis 2011). I start by situating current transition research in the sustainability debate. The relation between the two is simultaneously specific and vague: specific about processes at work during transitions, vague about the content and direction of the change. I then move on to a discussion of how a better conceptualisation of technology could strengthen the transition framework. I want to thank the two reviewers for their critical remarks, that stimulated me to better explain my position.     

Model,Metamodel and Topology

This reply to Gash’s (Found Sci 2013) commentary on Nescolarde-Selva and Usó-Doménech (Found Sci 2013) answers the three questions raised and at the same time opens up new questions.     

Revealing the Face of Isis

This reply to Gash’s (Found Sci 2014) commentary on Nescolarde-Selva and Usó-Doménech (Found Sci 2014b) answers the questions raised and at the same time opens up new questions.     

n-Way Metrics

We study a family of n-way metrics that generalize the usual two-way metric. The n-way metrics are totally symmetric maps from E ⁿ into \mathbbR _{\geqslant 0} {\mathbb{R}_{ \geqslant 0}} . The three-way metrics introduced by Joly and Le Calvé (1995) and Heiser and Bennani (1997) and the n-way metrics studied in Deza and Rosenberg (2000) belong to this family. It is shown how the n-way metrics and n-way distance measures are related to (n − 1)-way metrics, respectively, (n − 1)-way distance measures.     

Fixed or Probable Ideas?

This commentary on Nescolarde-Selva and Usó-Doménech (Found Sci, 2013) raises questions about the dynamic versus static nature of the model proposed, and in addition asks whether the model might be used to explain ethical flexibility and rigidity.     

Data Analysis: Models or Techniques?

In this commentary to Napoletani et al. (Found Sci 16:1–20, 2011), we argue that the approach the authors adopt suggests that neural nets are mathematical techniques rather than models of cognitive processing, that the general approach dates as far back as Ptolemy, and that applied mathematics is more than simply applying results from pure mathematics.     

Analysis of Some Speculations Concerning the Far Future of Intelligent Civilizations

I discuss some of the speculations proposed by Stewart (2010a). These include the following propositions: the cooperation at larger and larger scales, the existence of larger scale processes, the enhancement of the tuning as the universe cycle repeats, the transmission between universes and the motivations to produce a new universe.     

Embodied Anomaly Resolution in Molecular Genetics: A Case Study of RNAi

Scientific anomalies are observations and facts that contradict current scientific theories and they are instrumental in scientific theory change. Philosophers of science have approached scientific theory change from different perspectives as Darden (Theory change in science: Strategies from Mendelian genetics, 1991) observes: Lakatos (In: Lakatos, Musgrave (eds) Criticism and the growth of knowledge, 1970) approaches it as a progressive “research programmes” consisting of incremental improvements (“monster barring” in Lakatos, Proofs and refutations: The logic of mathematical discovery, 1976), Kuhn (The structure of scientific revolutions, 1996) observes that changes in “paradigms” are instigated by a crisis from some anomaly, and Hanson (In: Feigl, Maxwell (eds) Current issues in the philosophy of science, 1961) proposes that discovery does not begin with hypothesis but with some “problematic phenomena requiring explanation”. Even though anomalies are important in all of these approaches to scientific theory change, there have been only few investigations into the specific role anomalies play in scientific theory change. Furthermore, much of these approaches focus on the theories themselves and not on how the scientists and their experiments bring about scientific change (Gooding, Experiment and the making of meaning: Human agency in scientific observation and experiment, 1990). To address these issues, this paper approaches scientific anomaly resolution from a meaning construction point of view. Conceptual integration theory (Fauconnier and Turner, Cogn Sci 22:133–187, 1996; The way we think: Conceptual blending and mind’s hidden complexities, 2002) from cognitive linguistics describes how one constructs meaning from various stimuli, such as text and diagrams, through conceptual integration or blending. The conceptual integration networks that describe the conceptual integration process characterize cognition that occurs unconsciously during meaning construction. These same networks are used to describe some of the cognition while resolving an anomaly in molecular genetics called RNA interference (RNAi) in a case study. The RNAi case study is a cognitive-historical reconstruction (Nersessian, In: Giere (ed) Cognitive models of science, 1992) that reconstructs how the RNAi anomaly was resolved. This reconstruction traces four relevant molecular genetics publications in describing the cognition necessary in accounting for how RNAi was resolved through strategies (Darden 1991), abductive reasoning (Peirce, In: Hartshorne, Weiss (eds) Collected papers, 1958), and experimental reasoning (Gooding 1990). The results of the case study show that experiments play a crucial role in formulating an explanation of the RNAi anomaly and the integration networks describe the experiments’ role. Furthermore, these results suggest that RNAi anomaly resolution is embodied. It is embodied in a sense that cognition described in the cognitive-historical reconstruction is experientially based.

Artificial Diamonds are Still Diamonds

As a reply to the commentary (Lenhard in Found Sci, 2012), we stress here that structural understanding of data analysis techniques is the natural counterpart to the lack of understanding of phenomena in agnostic science. We suggest moreover that the dynamics of computational processes, and their parallels with the dynamics of natural processes, will increasingly be, possibly, the driving force of the development of data analysis.     

Spin and Wind Directions I: Identifying Entanglement in Nature and Cognition

We present a cognitive psychology experiment where participants were asked to select pairs of spatial directions that they considered to be the best example of Two different wind directions. Data are shown to violate the CHSH version of Bell’s inequality with the same magnitude as in typical Bell-test experiments with entangled spins. Wind directions thus appear to be conceptual entities connected through meaning, in human cognition, in a similar way as spins appear to be entangled in experiments conducted in physics laboratories. This is the first part of a two-part article. In the second part (Aerts et al. in Found Sci, 2017) we present a symmetrized version of the same experiment for which we provide a quantum modeling of the collected data in Hilbert space.     

Coherence of Our Best Scientific Theories

Putnam in Realism in mathematics and Elsewhere, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1975) infers from the success of a scientific theory to its approximate truth and the reference of its key term. Laudan in Philos Sci 49:19–49 (1981) objects that some past theories were successful, and yet their key terms did not refer, so they were not even approximately true. Kitcher in The advancement of science, Oxford University Press, New York (1993) replies that the past theories are approximately true because their working posits are true, although their idle posits are false. In contrast, I argue that successful theories which cohere with each other are approximately true, and that their key terms refer. My position is immune to Laudan’s counterexamples to Putnam’s inference and yields a solution to a problem with Kitcher’s position.     

Optimization Strategies for Two-Mode Partitioning

Two-mode partitioning is a relatively new form of clustering that clusters both rows and columns of a data matrix. In this paper, we consider deterministic two-mode partitioning methods in which a criterion similar to k-means is optimized. A variety of optimization methods have been proposed for this type of problem. However, it is still unclear which method should be used, as various methods may lead to non-global optima. This paper reviews and compares several optimization methods for two-mode partitioning. Several known methods are discussed, and a new fuzzy steps method is introduced. The fuzzy steps method is based on the fuzzy c-means algorithm of Bezdek (1981) and the fuzzy steps approach of Heiser and Groenen (1997) and Groenen and Jajuga (2001). The performances of all methods are compared in a large simulation study. In our simulations, a two-mode k-means optimization method most often gives the best results. Finally, an empirical data set is used to give a practical example of two-mode partitioning. We would like to thank two anonymous referees whose comments have improved the quality of this paper. We are also grateful to Peter Verhoef for providing the data set used in this paper.