FIDELHOLTZ_DOOCHIN_JAMES_LAWRENCE wrote:
>
> The *only* reasonable (ie, scientific, I would say) research strategy is
> to always assume that any hypothesized categories are strict (yes or no)
> and see what that produces as results.
I disagree completely, but I'd be interested in knowing what makes you say
this (independently of my brief comment below).
First, just a quibble: I don't think categories can be hypothesized
because categories can't be falsified. Theories (models that are
constructed as interlocking, ontologically-grounded collections of
assertions) and other models can be falsified and therefore hypothesized,
and they can posit categories as part of their ontological grounding.
Second, there are whole domains of physical science and bioscience where
binary (yes/no) categories are simply useless (with the marginally
relevant exception of occasional discrete approximations in Chapter One of
whatever textbook). Language and other social phenomena are even more
complex than those in bioscience, and I'd be hard put to find any useful
category at all in that realm that I could comfortably consider to be
binary.
So it surprises me that you would think that the only reasonable research
strategy in science would have to be based on binary categories, and I'm
quite sure that I wouldn't even know where to start in the kind of
neurobiologically-informed cognitive science I'm interested in with a
research strategy that is confined to binary categories.
-- Mark
Mark P. Line
Polymathix
San Antonio, TX
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