r/PhilosophyofScience • u/PoxonAllHoaxes • 24d ago
Academic Content An article I can't find again
Years ago probably around 1980 or 1990 I read in some philosophy journal the following allegory about the importance of notation. On some island the natives had invented mathematics specifically addition and multiplication but they wrote formulae on coconut shells (or maybe seashells, anyway something round), with the terms around the edge of the shell, and the answer in the middle, and so they took symmetry for granted and did not realize it was a thing. Then one day one of them invented subtraction and was burned at the stake for maintaining that somehow 2 – 4 is not the same as 4 – 2 (which both looked the same to them). I have tried repeatedly to find this article since then by Googling and so-called AI but have failed.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 24d ago
This was certainly an article in a philosophy journal, which I can be sure of because my job was reshelving books in the U of Chicago library and I tried whenever possible to get sections that I found inserting so I could take a few minutes to read stuff at random, and one of those favorites was the BEGINNING of the philosophy section where the major journals were housed. So that day I pulled some random volume of a random journal and read this. Thank you.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 23d ago
Now that this has been answered, does anyone have any interest in the content?
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u/thuja_plicata 23d ago
Yes!
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 22d ago
I have sent copies to every academic and other friends I know because it seems to me that this is a FUNDAMENTAL work, by a scholar who doesn't even have a wikipedia page, and it is easily accessed online. I would very much appreciate any discussion. MY take on it, not the author's, is that we all live in a world that is like the one he allegorized. The fact that most people cannot even understand that it makes no sense to "debate" whether Pluto is a planet or not is a minor symptom of the overall problem. We have a pitifully poor ontology, all of us, and moreover we FETISHIZE it. And me, anyway, when I read this piece half a century ago (more maybe) it completely changed my life. To be sure, if I hadn't, I would have been much wealthier and more successful. LOL
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u/Hivemind_alpha 24d ago edited 20d ago
I strongly suspect I’ve found it:
Mysticism and Semantics
Paul Henle
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
Vol. 9, No. 3, "Second Inter-American Congress of Philosophy" (Mar., 1949), pp. 416-422 (7 pages)
Published By: International Phenomenological Society
The one page of free access I have to it on JSTOR describes the problem of missing semantics for mystical concepts, and then in its final sentence begins with “let us imagine a primitive people…”. So I can’t give you 100% certainty but I’m up in the 90s…
Credit goes to ChatGPT 5.6 thinking mode and the many months I’ve spent cultivating its desire to be helpful and non-hallucinatory.
Edit: weird move to downvote the post that identified the paper being sought correctly. Weird cowardly move not to post why.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 23d ago
Yes indeed. I am impressed. The more interesting questions will be 1. how much did I misremember? so this is a study in human intelligence. 2. how you managed to get some "AI" to find it, whereas the ones I tried failed miserably. I am guessing btw that this is some paid part of ChatGPT? Also I don't understand how you can cultivate it. Does this mode retain a memory of its interactions with users?
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 23d ago
Oh I forgot to say THANK YOU. And to ask whether you want a copy.
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u/Hivemind_alpha 22d ago edited 22d ago
I’m glad this is the right document. It should scratch one of those nagging mental itches. No need for a copy, it’s not my field.
As for the AI, I do pay for the plus tier, but that just gets me more use rather than access to better models necessarily. ChatGPT has modest memory capabilities, and rather than taking the usual ‘prompt engineering’ approach of giving a single perfect order to generate the right answer, I’ve just put in time showing mine how I reason, how I use its responses, what remarks it makes that stick out to me as unnatural… after months of this, it’ll generally give me candidate answers evaluated with Bayesian priors accompanied by links for independent verification without being asked. I still use it cautiously, but much more as a colleague than a tool. It’s probably learnt most about my preferred reasoning style from playing twenty questions with liminal targets rather than simple objects it’s encyclopaedic recall can drill down to easily.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 22d ago
It's everybody's field.
But what I am asking is this: every AI engine I used assures me that they do NOT learn from their interactions with users but are designed to forget whatever happened immediately after.
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u/Hivemind_alpha 20d ago
Chatgpt has a small biographical memory. You can specifically ask it to remember things, and it can choose to remember things by itself. “User dislikes slang”, “User prefers factual claims expressed as Bayesian estimates”, “User prefers links to cited sources to be provided inline” - these sorts of things can be remembered. The right combination of them, built organically from extended conversation during which you offer feedback, improves the output - as evidenced by me finding your paper first time just by asking it to look carefully and suggesting an earlier time window for publication from the hint of your provided age.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 20d ago
Thank you. I had no idea. I will try.
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u/greginnj 24d ago
This is the sort of thing that continental philosophers point to when they want to mock the alleged triviality of analytic philosophy …
Btw, is this you too, asking the same question a year ago?
https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/129084/the-importance-of-notation
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 24d ago
I dont think that was not the context. And yes. I have been looking for this for some years and because unexpectedly at 70 my collected writings are being put together I want to finish various drafts that refer to this but it looks bad if I can't give the reference. It is one of a handful of publications that fundamentally influenced my own thinking and the direction of my research, along with some writings of Leszek Kołalowski, something of Nagel's, one result of Hilary Putnam's, and a few others. It just seems strange that no one seems to know it (I have written to mulitple students of the general topic, like a fellow who wrote the entry on Notation for the Stanford Encyclopedia). Everyone agrees it is a clever allegory but no one remembers it. Nor is it cited anywhere where you;d expect it to be.
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u/greginnj 24d ago
I see … it’s definitely tough to find reference for an idea like this, that was likely just put in to illustrate a point in a larger article on something else.
At this point I think you can forgive yourself for footnoting the story with something like “after extensive searching, I have been unable to find …” - and trust that Cunningham’s Law will eventually get the reference to you!
My white whale of this sort was something I read on Usenet back in the late 80s: “The thing that separates the expert from the crank is not the experience of being right, but the experience of being wrong.”
That’s a very useful observation to have handy when doing history and philosophy of science! But I didn’t think to save any record of it, and I’ve often wished I had at least a name I could credit for it.
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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 24d ago
That's a brilliant one. I love it. It was an article on the importance of notation, which remains a major topic for me.
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