Hi TOK List,

 

  I had an interesting insight last night (yes, Friday night is a thinking night 😊). One my walk yesterday, I was listening to this episode of the Jim Rutt Show. It is Episode 12 with Brian Nosek who is a UVA prof pioneering some new Open Science platforms and is famous for spearheading the replicability crisis. It is an interested episode, but the thing I wanted to share is that they were talking about computer “code” and sharing code and all of the different forms of code that were out there. At 44 minutes, they get to “the ontology problem”, which is the issue of definitions of categories across code. Here is a description of it. What struck me was Jim Rutt’s comment about it, which is that you can’t solve the ontology problem. He states flatly (at 44 min) that anyone who says they have solved the ontology problem is obviously a quack, and it would be like someone who claimed they found a way to beat the second law of thermodynamics. Thus he would not even need to listen. Bottom line, there is no ultimate “code”.

 

  The insight was actually I think I can defend the ToK System as an ultimate scientific ontology. Really, it is an “O O E” System, meaning it is a simultaneously depiction of “Ontic reality” that is mapped by a scientific “Onto-Epistemology”. Thus the O O E (me and my acronyms 😊). Indeed, it felt ironic that I was listening to Jim Rutt’s podcast right after I posted a blog on ontology. (For an even weirder “synchronicity” for the mystics out there, consider that Jim Rutt lives in Staunton and he drove over to Charlottesville to interview Brian. My house happens to be equidistant between the two 😊 in Stuarts Draft—how is that for a weird spacetime coincidence?). Now, the specific ontology problem in code is not exactly the ontology problem of science, but the two are, I think, actually related in a deep way. It is the question of: What is your foundational definitional system? What are the concepts and categories you are using to divide the world?

 

  The “simple” discovery of the ToK is that science is a behavioral ontology. That is, it characterizes the ontic reality in terms of objects, fields, complexity and change, which are measured and modeled with a focus on justifiable accuracy (i.e., reliability and validity), relative to competing models and explanations. This is the behavioral epistemology that is the scientific method, applied to the various domains of inquiry. The various domains of natural/human/basic science are mapped by the Periodic Table of Behavior. Note that I stumbled into this problem via the problem of psychology, which I think is very similar to the ontology code problem. Prior to the ToK, there simply has been no way to develop a comprehensive scientific ontology of mind/psyche/neuro-cognition/consciousness/animal-to-human behavior.

 

  Bottom line, I think I can defend the ToK as the best existing scientific ontology. And I think that most traditional scientists would think like Jim Rutt does about the ontology problem regarding generalized “code”. That is, by an a priori assumption, it just must be impossible. What is inevitable given the nature of the problem is a collection of ontologies. That is why science would never have a single worldview.

 

  But maybe that was not quite right. Maybe we can develop a scientific worldview. If the ToK solves the ontology problem of science…well, folks, that is good news 😊.

 

Peace,

G