On Fri, 1 Dec 1995, John O'Neill wrote:
> I see I can reintroduce my theory thread again :->
>
> The process you have described as the scientific method is quite correct
> as a learning method _within_an_existing_paradigm.
>
> However, what happens when the results of your actions are not what you
> expect, are these anomalies errors, mistakes, or do they indicate that
> there may be a problem in your theory requiring you to change your
> viewpoint of the world - note we're not just talking about developing new
> hypotheses here, sometimes we need to completely reformulate the way we
> view the world e.g. moving from Newtonian physics to Einsteinian physics.
>
> I've just been reading Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific
> Revolutions" which is all about paradigm shifts, the nature of scientific
> discovery, and the importance of anomalies in learning. Kuhn's work is
> quite important in describing learning both within a paradigm, and what
> happens when an existing paradigm becomes inadequate.
Hi John,
Are you familiar with Boris Katz's work at the MIT AI lab? He's developed
an AI application that uses reverse transformations.
One of the very interesting things about this application is that it can
answer questions from people with different meanings of the words they use
in their questions.
I think that AI applications like these can help us deal with issues of
context and paradigms shifts.
Andrew Moreno
PS if you get any meaningful information from him re: your queries, could
you please forward a summary to me? Thanks
-- Andrew Moreno <amoreno@broken.ranch.org>