Descartes, updated.

December 27, 2012 § 1 Comment

Figure 1. A vortex, in Leonardo’s imaginations.

…and a few sentences later :

1. Method a la Carte(sian)

In Descartes’ own words:

ad (1), Stability

ad (2), Additivity

ad (3), Duality

ad (4), Transferability

2. Foundation, now

3. Method, now

3.1. …Taken Abstract

3.2. … from the Domain Perspective

  • (2) physiology,
  • (3) behavior, and
  • (4) phylogenesis (evolution).

3.3. The Specialty…

  • (6) Ethical and moral considerations;

3.4. …and the (Notorious, Critical) Game

4. Grand Cultural Perspective

5. Values, Ethics, and Plans

5.1. Language Games

5.2. Values

As Fraser remarked from a Deleuzean perspective [29],

5.3. Ethics: Theories of Morality

5.4. Proceduralizing Theory

6. Dealing with Future(s)

6.1. Informational Tools

  • – market,
  • – insurance

6.2. Complexity

Further more, he also states that

The planning system is a complex system (footnote 24).

… and in the respective footnote 24:

  • (3) standardization;
  • (5) systemic knots.

6.3. Vision

7. Perplexion

7.1. Method, Generic Differentiation and Urban Reason.

urban reason 4t

7.2. “Failing” Plans

7.3. Eternal Folds

8. Summary

9. Outlook

17. Difference between architecture and arts, particularly painting.

+ a procedural scheme for the selection of plans;
+ clarification interrelationship between different “levels” of planning;
+ describing institutional procedures of plan bargaining;
+ devising a consulting system on preference, information,
monitoring, and plan evaluation.

22. Rem Koolhaas, Euro-Lille, see this.

26. here and here or here;

29. inspired by Alfred N. Whitehead and Isabel Stengers.

30. See this about the concept of theory.

31. Unfortunately available in German language only.

38. Hudry [49] attributes it to Aristotle.

  • [15] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations.
  • [32] Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden.
  • [40] Frederic Vester.

September 7, 2012 § Leave a comment

Animals behave. Of course, one could say.

Yet, why do we feel a certain naturalness here, in this relation between the cat as an observed and classified animal on the one side and the language game “behavior” on the other? Why don’t we say, for instance, that the animal happens? Or, likewise, that it is moved by its atoms? To which conditions does the language game “behavior” respond?

As strange as this might look like, it is actually astonishing that physicists easily attribute the quality of “behavior” to their dog or their cat, albeit they rarely will attribute them ideas (for journeys or the like). For physicists usually claim that the whole world can be explained in terms of the physical laws that govern the movement of atoms (e.g. [1]). Even physicists, it seems, exhibit some dualism in their concepts when it comes to animals. Yet, physicists claimed for a long period of time, actually into the mid of the 1980ies, that behavioral sciences actually could not count as a “science” at all, despite the fact that Lorenz and Tinbergen won the Nobel prize for medical sciences in 1973.

The difficulties physicists obviously suffer from are induced by a single entity: complexity. Here we refer to the notion of complexity that we developed earlier, which essentially is built from the following 5 elements.

  • – Flux of entropy, responsible for dissipation;
  • – Antagonistic forces, leading to emergent patterns;
  • – Standardization, mandatory for temporal persistence on the level of basic mechanisms as well as for selection processes;
  • – Compartmentalization, together with left-overs leading to spatio-temporal persistence as selection;
  • – Self-referential hypercycles, leading to sustained 2nd order complexity with regard to the relation of the whole to its parts.

Any setup for which we can identify this set of elements leads to probabilistic patterns that are organized on several levels. In other words, these conditioning elements are necessary and sufficient to “explain” complexity. In behavior, the sequence of patterns and the sequence of more simple elements within patterns are by far not randomly arranged, yet, it is more and more difficult to predict a particular pattern the higher its position in the stack of nested patterns, that is, its level of integration. Almost the same could be said about the observable changes in complex systems.

Dealing with behavior is thus a non-trivial task. There are no “laws” that would be mapped somehow into the animal such that an apriori defined mathematical form would suffice for a description of the pattern, or the animal as a whole. In behavioral sciences, one first has to fix a catalog of behavioral elements, and only by reference to this catalog we can start to observe in a way that will allow for comparisons with other observations. I deliberately avoid the concept of “reproducibility” here. How to know about that catalog, often called behavioral taxonomy? The answer is we can’t know in the beginning. To reduce observation completely to the physical level is not a viable alternative either. Observing a particular species, and often even a particular social group or individual improves over time, yet we can’t speak about that improvement. There is a certain notion of “individual” culture here that develops between the “human” observer and the behaving system, the animal. The written part of this culture precipitates in the said catalog, but there remains a large part of habit of observing that can’t be described without performing it. Observations on animals are never reproducible in the same sense as it is possible with physical entities. The ultimate reason being that the latter are devoid of individuality.

A behavioral scientist may work on quite different levels. She could investigate some characteristics of behavior in relation to the level of energy consumption, or to differential reproductive success. On this level, one would hardly go into the details of the form of behavior. Quite differently to this case are those investigations that are addressing the level of the form of the behavior. The form becomes an important target of the investigation if the scientist is interested in the differential social dynamics of animals belonging to different groups, populations or species. In physics, there is no form other than the mathematical. Electrons are (treated in) the same (way) by physicists all over the world, even across the whole universe. Try this with cats… You will loose the cat-ness.

It is quite clear that the social dynamics can’t be addressed by means of mere frequencies of certain simple behavioral elements, such like scratching, running or even sniffing at other animals. There might be differences, but we won’t understand too much of the animal, of course, particularly not with regard to the flow of information in which the animal engages.

The big question that arose during the 1970ies and the 1980ies was, how to address behavior, its structure, its patterning, and thereby to avoid a physicalist reduction?

Some intriguing answers has been given in the respective discourse since the beginning of the 1950ies, though only a few people recognized the importance of the form. For instance, to understand wolves Moran and Fentress [2] used the concept of choreography to get a descriptional grip on the quite complicated patterns. Colmenares, in his work about baboons, most interestingly introduced the notion of the play to describe the behavior in a group of baboons. He distinguished more than 80 types of social games as an arrangement of “moves” that span across space and time in a complicated way; this behavioral wealth rendered it somewhat impossible to analyze the data at that time. The notion of the social game is so interesting because it is quite close to the concept of language game.

Doing science means to translate observations into numbers. Unfortunately, in behavioral sciences this translation is rather difficult and in itself only little standardized (so far) despite many attempts, precisely for the reason that behavior is the observable output of a deeply integrated complex system, for instance the animal. Whenever we are going to investigate behavior we carefully have to instantiate the selection of the appropriate level we are going to investigate. Yet, in order to understand the animal, we even could not reduce the animal onto a certain level of integration. We should map the fact of integration itself.

There is a dominant methodological aspect in the description of behavior that differs from those in sciences more close to physics. In behavioral sciences one can invent new methods by inventing new purposes, something that is not possible in classic physics or engineering, at least if matter is not taken as something that behaves. Anyway, any method for creating formal descriptions invokes mathematics.

Here it becomes difficult, because mathematics does not provide us any means to deal with emergence. We can’t, of course, blame mathematics for that. It is not possible in principle to map emergence onto an apriori defined set of symbols and operations.

The only way to approximate an appropriate approach is by a probabilistic methodology that also provides the means to distinguish various levels of integration. The first half of this program is easy to accomplish, the second less so. For the fact of emergence is a creative process, it induces the necessity for interpretation as a constructive principle. Precisely this has been digested by behavioral science into the practice of the behavioral catalog.

1. This Essay

Well, here in this essay I am not interested mainly in the behavior of animals or the sciences dealing with the behavior of animals. Our intention was just to give an illustration of the problematic field that is provoked by the “fact” of the animals and their “behavior”.  The most salient issue in this problematic field is the irreducibility, in turn caused by the complexity and the patterning resulting from it. The second important part on this field is given by the methodological answers to these concerns, namely the structured probabilistic approach, which responds appropriately to the serial characteristics of the patterns, that is, to the transitional consistency of the observed entity as well as the observational recordings.

The first of these issues—irreducibility—we need not to discuss in detail here. We did this before, in a previous essay and in several locations. We just have to remember that empiricist reduction means to attempt for a sufficient description through dissecting the entity into its parts, thereby neglecting the circumstances, the dependency on the context and the embedding into the fabric of relations that is established by other instances. In physics, there is no such fabric, there are just anonymous fields, in physics, there is no dependency on the context, hence form is not a topic in physics. As soon as form becomes an issue, we leave physics, entering either chemistry or biology. As said, we won’t go into further details about that. Here, we will deal mainly with the second part, yet, with regard to two quite different use cases.

We will approach these cases, the empirical treatment of “observations” in computational linguistics and in urbanism, first from the methodological perspective, as both share certain conditions with the “analysis” of animal behavior. In chapter 8 we will give more pronounced reasons about this alignment, which at first sight may seem to be, well, a bit adventurous. The comparative approach, through its methodological arguments, will lead us to the emphasis of what we call “behavioral turn”. The text and the city are regarded as behaving entities, rather than the humans dealing with them.

The chapters in this essay are the following:

Table of Content (active links)

2. The Inversion

Given the two main conceptual landmarks mentioned above—irreducibility and the structured probabilistic approach—that establish the problematic field of behavior, we now can do something exciting. We take the concept and its conditions, detach it from its biological origins and apply it to other entities where we meet the same or rather similar conditions. In other words, we practice a differential as Deleuze understood it [3]. So, we have to spend a few moments for dealing with these conditions.

Slightly re-arranged and a bit more abstract than it is the case in behavioral sciences, these conditions are:

  • – There are patterns that appear in various forms, despite they are made from the same elements.
  • – The elements that contribute to the patterns are structurally different.
  • – The elements are not all plainly visible; some, most or even the most important are only implied.
  • – Patterns are arranged in patterns, implying that patterns are also elements, despite the fact that there is no fixed form for them.
  • – The arrangement of elements and patterns into other patterns is dependent on the context, which in turn can be described only in probabilistic terms.
  • – Patterns can be classified into types or families; the classification however, is itself non-trivial, that is, it is not supported.
  • – The context is given by variable internal and external influences, which imply a certain persistence of the embedding of the observed entity into its spatial, temporal and relational neighborhood.
  • – There is a significant symbolic “dimension” in the observation, meaning that the patterns we observe occur in sequence space upon an alphabet of primitives, not just in the numerical space. This symbolistic account is invoked by the complexity of the entity itself. Actually, the difference between symbolic and numerical sequences and patterns are much less than categorical, as we will see. Yet, it makes a large difference either to include or to exclude the methodological possibility for symbolic elements in the observation.

Whenever we meet these conditions, we can infer the presence of the above mentioned problematic field, that is mainly given by irreducibility and—as its match in the methodological domain—the practice of a structured probabilistic approach. This list provides us an extensional circumscription of abstract behavior.

A slightly different route into this problematic field draws on the concept of complexity. Complexity, as we understand it by means of the 5 elements provided above (for details see the full essay on this subject), can itself be inferred by checking for the presence of the constitutive elements. Once we see antagonisms, compartments, standardization we can expect emergence and sustained complexity, which in turn means that the entity is not reducible and in turn, that a particular methodological approach must be chosen.

We also can clearly state what should not be regarded as a member of this field. The most salient one is the neglect of individuality. The second one, now in the methodological domain, is the destruction of the relationality as it is most easy accomplished by referring to raw frequency statistics. It should be obvious that destroying the serial context in an early step of the methodological mapping from observation to number also destroys any possibility to understand the particularity of the observed entity. The resulting picture will not only be coarse, most probably it also will be utterly wrong, and even worse, there is no chance to recognize this departure into the area that is free from any sense.

3. The Targets

At the time of writing this essay, there are currently three domains that suffer most from the reductionist approach. Well, two and a half, maybe, as the third, genetics, is on the way to overcome the naïve physicalism of former days.

This does not hold for the other two areas, urbanism and computational linguistics, at least as far as it is relevant for text mining  and information retrieval1. The dynamics in the respective communities are of course quite complicated, actually too complicated to achieve a well-balanced point of view here in this short essay. Hence, I am asking to excuse the inevitable coarseness regarding the treatment of those domains as if they would be homogenous. Yet, I think, that in both areas the mainstream is seriously suffering from a mis-understood scientism. In some way, people there strangely enough behave more positivist than researchers in natural sciences.

In other words, we follow the question how to improve the methodology in those two fields of urbanism and computerized treatment of textual data. It is clear that the question about methodology implies a particular theoretical shift. This shift we would like to call the “behavioral turn”. Among other changes, the “behavioral turn” as we construct it allows for overcoming the positivist separation between observer and the observed without sacrificing the possibility for reasonable empiric modeling.2

Before we argue in a more elaborate manner about this proposed turn in relation to textual data and urbanism, we first would like two accomplish two things. First, we briefly introduce two methodological concepts that deliberately try to cover the context of events, where those events are conceived as part of a series that always also develops into kind of a network of relations. Thus, we avoid to conceive of events as a series of separated points.

Secondly, we will discuss current mainstream methodology in the two fields that we are going to focus here. I think that the investigation of the assumptions of these approaches, often remaining hidden, sheds some light onto the arguments that support the reasonability of the “behavioral turn”.

4. Methodology

The big question remaining to deal with is thus: how to deal with the observations that we can make in and about our targets, the text or the city?

There is a clear starting point for the selection of any method as a method that could be considered as appropriate. The method should inherently respond to the seriality of the basic signal. A well-known method of choice for symbolic sequences are Markov chains, another important one are random contexts and random graphs. In the domain of numerical sequences wavelets are the most powerful way to represent various aspects of a signal at once.

Markov Processes

A Markov chain is the outcome of applying the theory of Markov processes onto a symbolic sequence. A Markov process is a neat description of the transitional order in a sequence. We also may say that it describes the conditional probabilities for the transitions between any subset of elements. Well, in this generality it is difficult to apply. Let us thus start with the most simple form, the Markov process of 1st order.

A 1st order Markov process describes just and only all pairwise transitions that are possible for given “alphabet” of discrete entries (symbols). These transitions can be arranged in a so-called transition matrix if we obey to the standard to use the preceding part of the transitional pair as row header and the succeeding part of the transitional pair as a column header. If a certain transition occurs, we enter a tick into the respective cell, given by the address row x column, which derives from the pair prec -> succ. That’s all. At least for the moment.

Such a table captures in some sense the transitional structure of the observed sequence. Of course, it captures only a simple aspect, since the next pair does not know anything about the previous pair. A 1st order Markov process is thus said to have no memory. Yet, it would be a drastic misunderstanding to generalize the absence of memory to any kind of Markov process. Actually, Markov processes can precisely be used to investigate the “memories” in a sequence, as we will see in a moment.

Anyway, on any kind of such a transition table we can do smart statistics, for instance to identify transitions that are salient for the “exceptional” high or low frequency. Such a reasoning takes into account the marginal frequencies of such a table and is akin to correspondence analysis. Van Hooff developed this “adjusted residual method” and  has been applying it with great success in the analysis of observational data on Chimpanzees [4][5].

These residuals are residuals against a null-model, which in this case is the plain distribution. In other words, the reasoning is simply the same as always in statistics, aiming at establishing a suitable ratio of observed/expected, and then to determine the reliability of a certain selection that is based on that ratio. In the case of transition matrices the null-model states that all transitions occur with the same frequency. This is of course, simplifying, but it is also simple to calculate. There are of course some assumptions in that whole procedure that are worthwhile to be mentioned.

The most important assumption of the null-model is that all elements that are being used to set up the transitional matrix are independent from each other, except their 1st order dependency, of course. This also means that the null-model assumes equal weights for the elements of the sequence. It is quite obvious that we should assume so only in the beginning of the analysis. The third important assumption is that the process is stationary, meaning the kind and the strength of the 1st order dependencies do not change for the entire observed sequence.

Yet, nothing enforces us to stick to just the 1st order Markov processes, or to apply it globally. A 2nd order Markov process could be formulated which would map all transitions x(i)->x(i+2). We may also formulate a dense process for all orders >1, just by overlaying all orders from 1 to n into a single transitional matrix.

Proceeding this way, we end up with an ensemble of transitional models. Such an ensemble is suitable for the comparatist probabilistic investigation of the memory structure of a symbolic sequence that is being produced by a complex system. Matrices can be compared (“differenced”) regarding their density structure, revealing even spurious ties between elements across several steps in the sequence. Provided the observed sequence is long enough, single transition matrices as well as ensembles thereof can be resampled on parts of sequences in order to partition the global sequence, that is, to identify locally stable parts of the overall process.

Here you may well think that this sounds like a complicated “work-around” for a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). Yet, despite a HMM is more general than the transition matrix perspective in some respect, it is also less wealthy. In HMM, the multiplicity is—well—hidden. It reduces the potential complexity of sequential data into a single model, again with the claim of global validity. Thus, HMM are somehow more suitable the closer we are to physics, e.g. in speech recognition. But even there their limitation is quite obvious.

From the domain of ecology we can import another trick for dealing with the transitional structure. In ecosystems we can observe the so-called succession. Certain arrangements of species and their abundance follow rather regularly, yet probabilistic to each other, often heading towards some stable final “state”. Given a limited observation about such transitions, how can we know about the final state? Using the transitional matrix the answer can be found simply by a two-fold operation of multiplying the matrix with itself and intermittent filtering by renormalization. This procedure acts as a frequency-independent filter. It helps to avoid type-II errors when applying the adjusted residuals method, that is, transitions with a weak probability will be less likely dismissed as irrelevant ones.

The method of Markov processes is powerful, but is suffers from a serious problem. This problem is introduced by the necessity to symbolize certain qualities of the signal in advance to its usage in modeling.

We can’t use Markov processes directly on the raw textual data. Doing so instead would trap us in the symbolistic fallacy. We would either ascribe the symbol itself a meaning—which would result in a violation of the primacy of interpretation—or it would conflate the appearance of a symbol with its relevance, which would constitute a methodological mistake.

The way out of this situation is provided by a consequent probabilization. Generally we may well say that probabilisation takes the same role for quantitative sciences as the linguistic turn did for philosophy. Yet, it is still an attitude that is largely being neglected as a dedicated technique almost everywhere in any science. (for an example application of probabilisation with regard to evolutionary theory see this)

Instead of taking symbols as they are pretended to be found “out there”, we treat them as outcome of an abstract experiment, that is, as a random variable. Random variables establish them not as dual concepts, as 1 or 0, to be or not to be, they establish themselves as a probability distribution. Such a distribution contains potentially an infinite number of discretizations. Hence, probabilistic methods are always more general than those which rely on “given” symbols.

Kohonen et al. proposed a simple way to establish a random context [6]. The step from symbolic crispness to a numerical representation is not trivial, though. We need a double-articulated entity that is “at home” in both domains. This entity is a high-dimensional random fingerprint. Such a fingerprint consists simply of a large number, well above 100, of random values from the interval [0..1]. According to the Lemma of Hecht-Nielsen [7]  any two of such vectors are approximately orthogonal to each other. In other words, it is a name expressed by numbers.

After a recoding of all symbols in a text into their random fingerprints it is easy to establish  probabilistic distributions of the neighborhood of any word. The result is a random context, also called a random graph. The basic trick to accomplish such a distribution is to select a certain, fixed size for the neighborhood—say five or seven positions in total—and then arrange the word of interest always to a certain position, for instance into the middle position.

This procedure we do for all words in a text, or any symbolic series. Doing so, we get a collection of random contexts, that overlap. The final step then is a clustering of the vectors according to their similarity.

It is quite obvious that this procedure as it has been proposed by Kohonen sticks to strong assumptions, despite its turn to probabilization. The problem is the fixed order, that is, the order is independent from context in his implementation. Thus his approach is still limited in the same way as the n-gram approach (see chp.5.3 below). Yet, sometimes we meet strong inversions and extensions of relevant dependencies between words. Linguistics speak of injected islands with regard to wh*-phrases. Anaphors are another example. Chomsky critized the approach of fixed–size contexts very early.

Yet, there is no necessity to limit the methodology to fixed-size contexts, or to symmetrical instances of probabilistic contexts. Yes, of course this will result in a situation, where we corrupt the tabularity of the data representation. Many rows are different in their length and there is (absolutely) no justification to enforce a proper table by filling “missing values” into the “missing” cells of the table

Fortunately, there is another (probabilistic) technique that could be used to arrive at a proper table, without distorting the content by adding missing values. This technique is random projection, first identified by Johnson & Lindenstrauss (1984), which in the case of free-sized contexts has to be applied in an adaptive manner (see [8] or [9] for a more recent overview). Usually, a source (n*p) matrix (n=rows, p=columns=dimensions) is multiplied with a (p*k) random matrix, where the random numbers follow a Gaussian distribution), resulting in a target matrix of only k dimensions and n rows. This way a matrix of 10000+ columns can be projected into one made only from 100 columns without loosing much information. Yet, using the lemma of Hecht-Nielsen we can compress any of the rows of a matrix individually. Since the random vectors are approximately orthogonal to each other we won’t introduce any information across all the data vectors that are going to be fed into the SOM. This stepwise operation becomes quite important for large amounts of documents, since in this case we have to adopt incremental learning.

Such, we approach slowly but steadily the generalized probabilistic context that we described earlier. The proposal is simply that in dealing with texts by means of computers we have to apply precisely the most general notion of context, which is devoid from structural pre-occupations as we can meet them e.g. in the case of n-grams or Markov processes.

5. Computers Dealing with Text

Currently, so-called “text mining” is a hot topic. More and more of human communication is supported by digitally based media and technologies, hence more and more texts are accessible to computers without much efforts. People try to use textual data from digital environments for instance to do sentiment analysis about companies, stocks, or persons, mainly in the context of marketing. The craziness there is that they pretend to classify a text’s sentiment without understanding it, more or less on the frequency of scattered symbols.

The label “text mining” reminds to “data mining”; yet, the structure of the endeavors are drastically different. In data mining one is always interested in the relevant variables n order to build a sparse model that even could be understood by human clients. The model then in turn is used to optimize some kind of process from which the data for modeling has been extracted.

In the following we will describe some techniques, methods and attitudes that are highly unsuitable for the treatment of textual “data”, despite the fact that they are widely used.

Fault 1 : Objectivation

The most important difference between the two flavor of “digital mining” concerns however, the status of the “data”. In data mining, one deals with measurements that are arranged in a table. This tabular form is only possible on the basis of a preceding symbolization, which additionally is strictly standardized also in advance to the measurement.

In text mining this is not possible. There are no “explanatory” variables that could be weighted. Text mining thus just means to find a reasonable selection of text in response to a “query”. For textual data it is not possible to give any criterion how to look at a text, how to select a suitable reference corpus for determining any property of the text, or simply to compare it to other texts before its interpretation. There are no symbols, no criteria that could be filled into a table. And most significant, there is no target that could be found “in the data”.

It is devoid of any sense to try to optimize a selection procedure by means of a precision/recall ratio. This would mean that the meaning of text could be determined objectively before any interpretation, or, likewise, that the interpretation of a text is standardisable up to a formula. Both attempts are not possible, claiming otherwise is ridiculous.

People responded to these facts with a fierce endeavor, which ironically is called “ontology”, or even “semantic web”. Yet, neither will the web ever become “semantic” nor is database-based “ontology” a reasonable strategy (except for extremely standardized tasks). The idea in both cases is to determine the meaning of an entity before its actual interpretation. This of course is utter nonsense, and the fact that it is nonsense is also the reason why the so-called “semantic web” never started to work. They guys should really do more philosophy.

Fault 2 : Thinking in Frequencies

A popular measure for describing the difference of texts are variants of the so-called tf-idf measure. “tf” means “term frequency” and describes the normalized frequency of a term within a document. “idf” means “inverse document frequency”, which, actually, refers to the frequency of a word across all documents in a corpus.

The frequency of a term, even its howsoever differentialized frequency, can hardly be taken as the relevance of that term given a particular query. To cite the example from the respective entry in Wikipedia, what is “relevant” to select a document by means of the query “the brown cow”? Sticking to terms makes sense only if and only if we accept an apriori contract about the strict limitation to the level of the terms. Yet, this has nothing to do with meaning. Absolutely nothing. It is comparing pure graphemes, not even symbols.

Even if it would be related to meaning it would be the wrong method. Simply think about a text that contains three chapters: chapter one about brown dogs, chapter two about the relation of (lilac) cows and chocolate, chapter three about black & white cows. There is no phrase about a brown cow in the whole document, yet, it would certainly be selected as highly significant by the search engine.

This example nicely highlights another issue. The above mentioned hypothetical text could nevertheless be highly relevant, yet only in the moment the user would see it, triggering some idea that before not even was on the radar. Quite obviously, despite the search would have been different, probably, the fact remains that the meaning is neither in the ontology nor in the frequency and also not in text as such—before the actual interpretation by the user. The issue becomes more serious if we’d consider slightly different colors that still could count as “brown”, yet with a completely different spelling. And even more, if we take into account anaphoric arrangement.

The above mentioned method of Markov processes helps a bit, but not completely of course.

Astonishingly, even the inventors of the WebSom [6], probably the best model for dealing with textual data so far, commit the frequency fallacy. As input for the second level SOM they propose a frequency histogram. Completely unnecessary, I have to add, since the text “within” the primary SOM can be mapped easily to a Markov process, or to probabilistic contexts, of course. Interestingly, any such processing that brings us from the first to the second layer reminds somewhat more to image analysis than to text analysis. We mentioned that already earlier in the essay “Waves, Words and Images”.

Fault 3 : The Symbolistic Fallacy (n-grams & co.)

Another really popular methodology to deal with texts is n-grams. N-grams are related to Markov processes, as they also take the sequential order into account. Take for instance (again the example from Wiki) the sequence “to be or not to be”. The transformation into a 2-gram (or bi-gram) looks such “to be, be or, or not, not to, to be,” (items are between commas), while the 3-gram transformation produces “to be or, be or not, or not to, not to be”. In this way, the n-gram can be conceived as a small extract from a transition table of order (n-1). N-grams share a particular weakness with simple Markov models, which is the failure to capture long-range dependencies in language. These can be addressed only by means of deep grammatical structures. We will return to this point later in the discussion of the next fault No.4 (Structure as Meaning).

The strange thing is that people drop the tabular representation, thus destroying the possibility of calculating things like adjusted residuals. Actually, n-grams are mostly just counted, which is committing the first fault of thinking in frequencies, as described above.

N-gram help to build queries against databases that are robust against extensions of words, that is prefixes, suffixes, or forms of verbs due to flexing. All this has, however, nothing to do with meaning. It is a basic and primitive means to make symbolic queries upon symbolic storages more robust. Nothing more.

The real problem is the starting point: taking the term as such. N-grams start with individual words that are taken blindly as symbols. Within the software doing n-grams, they are even replaced by some arbitrary hash code, i.e. the software does not see a “word”, it deals just with a chunk of bits.

This way, using n-grams for text search commits the symbolistic fallacy, similar to ontologies, but even on a more basic level. In turn this means that the symbols are taken as “meaningful” for themselves. This results in a hefty collision with the private-language-argument put forward by Wittgenstein a long time ago.

N-grams are certainly more advanced than the nonsense based on tf-idf. Their underlying intention is to reflect contexts. Nevertheless, they fail as well. The ultimate reason for the failure is the symbolistic starting point. N-grams are only a first, though far too trivial and simplistic step into probabilization.

There is already a generalisation of n-grams available as described in published papers by Kohonen & Kaski: random graphs, based on random contexts, as we described it above. Random graphs overcome the symbolistic fallacy, especially if used together with SOM. Well, honestly I have to say that random graphs imply the necessity of a classification device like the SOM. This should not be considered as being a drawback, since n-grams are anyway often used together with Bayesian inference. Bayesian methods are, however, not able to distil types from observations as SOM are able to do. That now is indeed a drawback since in language learning the probabilistic approach necessarily must be accompanied with the concept of (linguistic) types.

Fault 4 : Structure as Meaning

The deep grammatical structure is an indispensable part of human languages. It is present from the sub-word level up to the level of rhetoric. And it’s gonna get really complicated. There is a wealth of rules, most of them to be followed rather strict, but some of them are applied only in a loose manner. Yet, all of them are rules, not laws.

Two issues are coming up here that are related to each other. The first one concerns the learning of a language. How do we learn a language? Wittgenstein proposed, simply by getting shown how to use it.

The second issue concerns the status of the models about language. Wittgenstein repeatedly mentioned that there is no possibility for a meta-language, and after all we know that Carnap’s program of a scientific language failed (completely). Thus we should be careful when applying a formalism to language, whether it is some kind of grammar, or any of the advanced linguistic “rules” that we know of today (see the lexicon of linguistics for that). We have to be aware that these symbolistic models are only projective lists of observations, arranged according to some standard of a community of experts.

Linguistic models are drastically different from models in physics or any other natural science, because in linguistics there is no outer reference. (Computational) Linguistics is mostly on the stage of a Babylonian list science [10], doing more tokenizing than providing useful models, comparable to biology in the 18th century.

Language is a practice. Language is a practice of human beings, equipped with a brain and embedded in a culture. In turn language itself is contributing to cultural structures and is embedded into it. There are many spatial, temporal and relational layers and compartments to distinguish. Within such arrangements, meaning happens in the course of an ongoing interpretation, which in turn is always a social situation. See Robert Brandom’s Making it Explicit as an example for an investigation of this aspect.

What we definitely have to be aware of is that projecting language onto a formalism, or subordinating language to an apriori defined or standardized symbolism (like in formal semantics) looses essentially everything language is made from and referring to. Any kind of model of a language is implicitly also claiming that language can be detached from its practice and from its embedding without loosing its main “characteristics”, its potential and its power. In short, it is the claim that structure conveys meaning.

This brings us to the question about the role of structure in language. It is a fact that humans not only understand sentences full of grammatical “mistakes”, and quite well so, in spoken language we almost always produce sentences that are full of grammatical mistakes. In fact, “mistakes” are so abundant that it becomes questionable to take them as mistakes at all. Methodologically, linguistics is thus falling back into a control science, forgetting about the role and the nature of symbolic rules such as it is established by grammar. The nature is an externalization, the role is to provide a standardization, a common basis, for performing interpretation of sentences and utterances in a reasonable time (almost immediately) and in a more or less stable manner. The empirical “given” of a sentence alone, even a whole text alone, can not provide enough evidence for starting with interpretation, nor even to finish it. (Note that a sentence is never a “given”.)

Texts as well as spoken language are nothing that could be controlled. There is no outside of language that would justify that perspective. And finally, a model should allow for suitable prediction, that is, it should enable us to perform a decision. Here we meet Chomsky’s call for competence. In case of language, a linguistic models should be able to produce language as a proof of concept. Yet, any attempt so far failed drastically, which actually is not really a surprise. Latest here it should become clear that the formal models of linguistics, and of course all the statistical approaches to “language processing” (another crap term from computational linguistics) are flawed in a fundamental way.

From the perspective of our interests here on the “Putnam Program” we conceive of formal properties as Putnam did in his “Meaning of “Meaning””. Formal properties are just that: properties among other properties. In our modeling essay we proposed to replace the concept of properties by the concept of the assignate, in order to emphasize the active role of the modeling instance in constructing and selecting the factors. Sometimes we use formal properties of terms and phrases, sometimes not, dependent on context, purpose or capability. There is neither a strict tie of formal assignates to the entity “word” or “sentence” nor could we detach them as part of formal approach.

Fault 5 : Grouping, Modeling and Selection

Analytic formal models are a strange thing, because such a model essentially claims that there is no necessity for a decision any more. Once the formula is there, it claims a global validity. The formula denies the necessity for taking the context as a structural element into account. It claims a perfect separation between observer and the observed. The global validity also means that the weights of the input factors are constant, or even that there are no such weights. Note that the weights translates directly into the implied costs of a choice, hence formulas also claim that the costs are globally constant, or at least, arranged in a smooth differentiable space. This is of course far from any reality for almost any interesting context, and of course for the contexts of language and urbanism, both deeply related to the category of the “social”.

This basic characteristic hence limits the formal symbolic approach to physical, if not just to celestial and atomic contexts. Trivial contexts, so to speak. Everywhere else something rather different is necessary. This different thing is classification as we introduced it first in our essay about modeling.

Searching for a text and considering a particular one as a “match” to the interests expressed by the search is a selection, much like any other “decision”. It introduces a notion of irreversibility. Searching itself is a difficult operation, even so difficult that is questionable whether we should follow this pattern at all. As soon as we start to search we enter the grammatological domain of “searching”. This means that we claim the expressibility of our interests in the search statement.

This difficulty is nicely illustrated by an episode with Gary Kasparov in the context of his first battle against “Deep Blue”. Given the billions of operations the super computer performed, a journalist came up with the question “How do find the correct move so fast?” Obviously, the journalist was not aware about the mechanics of that comparison. Kasparov answered: “ I do not search, I just find it.” His answer is not perfectly correct, though, as he should have said “I just do it”. In a conversation we mostly “just do language”. We practice it, but we very rarely search for a word, an expression, or the like. Usually, our concerns are on the strategic level, or in terms of speech act theory, on the illocutionary level.

Such we arrive now at the intermediary result that we have some kind of non-analytical models on the one hand, and the performance of their application on the other. Our suggestion is that most of these models are situated on an abstract, orthoregulative level, and almost never on the representational level of the “arrangement” of words.

A model has a purpose, even if it is an abstract one. There are no models without purpose. The purpose is synonymic to the selection. Often, we do not explicitly formulate a purpose, we just perform selections in a consistent manner. It is this consistency in the selections that imply a purpose. The really important thing to understand is also that the abstract notion of purpose is also synonymic to what we call “perspective”, or point of view.

One could mention here the analytical “models”, but those “models” are not models because they are devoid of a purpose. Given any interesting empirical situation, everybody knows that things may look quite different, just dependent on the “perspective” we take. Or in our words, which abstract purpose we impose to the situation. The analytic approach denies such a “perspectivism”.

The strange thing now is that many people mistake the mere clustering of observation on the basis of all contributing or distinguished factors as a kind of model. Of course, that grouping will radically change if we withdraw some of the factors, keeping only a subset of all available ones. Not only the grouping changes, but also the achievable typology and any further generalization will be also very different. In fact, any purpose, and even the tuning of the attitude towards the risk (costs) of unsuitable decisions changes the set of suitable factors. Nothing could highlight more the nonsense to call naïve take-it-all-clustering a “unsupervised modeling”. First, it is not a model. Second, any clustering algorithm or grouping procedure follows some optimality criterion, that is it supervises it despite claiming the opposite. “Unsupervised modeling” claims implicitly that it is possible to build a suitable model by pure analytic means, without any reference to the outside at all. This is, f course, not possible. It is this claim that is introducing a contradiction to the practice itself, because clustering usually means classification, which is not an analytic move at all. Due to this self-contradiction the term “unsupervised modeling” is utter nonsense. It is not only nonsense, it is even deceiving, as people get vexed by the term itself: they indeed believe that they are modeling in a suitable manner.

Now back to the treatment of texts. One of the most advanced procedures—it is a non-analytical one—is the WebSom. We described it in more detail in previous essays (here and here). Yet, as the second step Kohonen proposes clustering as a suitable means to decide about the similarity of texts. He is committing exactly the same mistake as described before. The trick, of course, is to introduce (targeted) modeling to the comparison of texts, despite the fact that there are no possible criteria apriori. What seems to be irresolvable disappears, however, as a problem if we take into account the self-referential relations of discourses, which necessarily engrave into the interpreter as self-modifying structural learning and historical individuality.

6. The Statistics of Urban Environments

The Importance of Conceptual Backgrounds

There is no investigation without implied purpose, simply because any investigation has to perform more often many selections rather than just some. One of the more influential selections that has to be performed considers the scope of the investigation. We already met this issue above when we discussed the affairs as we can meet it in behavioral sciences.

Considering investigations about social entities like urban environments, architecture or language. “scope” largely refers to the status of the individual, and in turn, to the status of time that we instantiate in our investigation. Both together establish the dimension of form as an element of the space of expressibility that we choose for the investigation.

Is the individual visible at all? I mean, in the question, in the method and after applying a methodology? For instance, as soon as we ask about matters of energy, individuals disappear. They also disappear if we apply statistics to raw observations, even if at first hand we would indeed observe individuals as individuals. To retain the visibility of individuals as individuals in a set of relations we have to apply proper means first. It is clear, that any cumulative measure like those from socio-economics also cause the disappearance of the context and the individual.

If we keep the individuals alive in our method, the next question we have to ask concerns the relations between the individuals. Do we keep them or do we drop them? Finally, regarding the unfolding of the processes that result from the temporal dynamics of those relations, we have to select whether we want to keep aspects of form or not. If you think that the way a text unfolds or the way things are happening in the urban environment is at least as important as their presence,  well in this case you would have to care about patterns.

It is rather crucial to understand that these basic selections determine the outcome of an investigation as well as of any modeling or even theory building as grammatological constraints. Once we took a decision on the scope, the problematics of that choice becomes invisible, completely transparent. This is the actual reason for the fact that choosing a reductionist approach as the first step is so questionable.

In our earlier essay about the belief system in modernism we emphasized the inevitability of the selection of a particular metaphysical stance, ways before we even think about the scope of an investigation in a particular domain. In case of modernistic thinking, from positivism to existentialism, including any shape of materialism, the core of the belief system is metaphysical independence, shaping all the way down towards politics methods, tools, attitudes and strategies. If you wonder whether there is an alternative to modernistic thinking, take a look to our article where we introduce the concept of the choreostemic space.

Space Syntax

In the case of “Space Syntax” the name is program. The approach is situated in urbanism; it has been developed and is still being advocated by Bill Hillier. Originally, Hillier was a geo-scientist, which is somewhat important to follow his methodology.

Put into a nutshell, the concept of space syntax claims that the description of the arrangement of free space in a built environment is necessary and sufficient for describing the quality of a city. The method of choice to describe that arrangement is statistics, either through the concept of probabilistic density of people or through the concept of regression, relating physical characteristics of free space with the density of people. Density in turn is used to capture the effect of collective velocity vectors. If people start to slow down, walking around in different directions, density increases. Density of course also increases as a consequence of narrow passages. Yet, in this case the vectors are strongly aligned.

The spatial behavior of individuals is a result and a means of social behavior in many animal species. Yet it makes a difference whether we consider the spatial behavior of individuals or the arrangement of free space in a city as a constraint of the individual spatial behavior. Hillier’s claim of “The Space is the Machine” is mistaking the one for the other.

In his writings, Hillier over and over again commits the figure of the petitio principii. He starts with the strong belief in analytics and upon that he tries to justify the use of analytical techniques. His claim of “The need for an analytic theory of architecture” ([11], p.40) is just one example. He writes

The answer proposed in this chapter is that once we accept that the object of architectural theory is the non-discursive — that is, the configurational — content of space and form in buildings and built environments, then theories can only be developed by learning to study buildings and built environments as non-discursive objects.

Excluding the discourse as a constitutional element only the analytic remains. He drops any relational account, focusing just the physical matter and postulating meaning of physical things, i.e. meaning as an apriori in the physical things. His problem is just his inability to distinguish different horizons of time, of temporal development. Dismissing time means to dismiss memory, and of course also culture. For a physicalist or ultra-modernist like him this blindness is constitutive. He never will understand the structure of his failure.

His dismissal of social issues as part of a theory serves eo ipso as his justification of the whole methodology. This is only possible due to another, albeit consistent, mistake, the conflation of theory and models. Hillier is showing us over and over again only models, yet not any small contribution to an architectural theory. Applying statistics shows us a particular theoretical stance, but is not to be taken as such! Statistics instantiates those models, that is his architectural theory is following largely the statistical theory. We repeatedly pointed to the problems that appear if we apply statistics to raw observations.

The high self-esteem Hillier expresses in his nevertheless quite limited writings is topped by treating space as syntax, in other words as a trivial machine. Undeniably, human beings have a material body, and buildings take space as material arrangements. Undeniably matter arranges space and constitutes space. There is a considerably discussion in philosophy about how we could approach the problematic field of space. We won’t go into details here, but Hillier simply drops the whole stuff.

Matter arranges in space. This becomes quickly a non-trivial insight, if we change perspective from abstract matter and the correlated claim of the possibility of reductionism to spatio-temporal processes, where the relations are kept taken as a starting point. We directly enter the domain of self-organization.

By means of “Space Syntax” Hillier claimed to provide a tool for planning districts of a city, or certain urban environments. If he would restrict his proposals to certain aspects of the anonymized flow of people and vehicles, it would be acceptable as a method. But it is certainly not a proper tool to describe the quality of urban environments, or even to plan them.

Recently, he delivered a keynote speech [12] where he apparently departed from his former Space Syntax approach, that reaches back to 1984. There he starts with the following remark.

On the face of it, cities as complex systems are made of (at least) two sub-systems: a physical sub-system, made up of buildings linked by streets, roads and infrastructure; and a human sub-system made up of movement, interaction and activity. As such, cities can be thought of as socio-technical systems. Any reasonable theory of urban complexity would need to link the social and technical sub-systems to each other.

This clearly is much less reductionist, at first sight at least, than “Space Syntax”. Yet, Hillier remains aligned to hard-core positivism. Firstly, in the whole speech he fails to provide a useful operationalization of complexity. Secondly, his Space Syntax simply appears wrapped in new paper. Agency for him is still just spatial agency. The relevant urban networks for him is just the network of streets. Thirdly, it is bare nonsense to separate a physical and a human subsystem, and then to claim the lumping together of those as a socio-technical system. He obviously is unaware of more advance and much more appropriate ways of thinking about culture, such as ANT, the Actor-Network-Theory (Bruno Latour), which precisely drops the categorical separation of physical and human. This separation has been first critized by Merlau-Ponty in the 1940ies!

Hillier served us just as an example, but you may have got the point. Occasionally, one can meet attempts that at least try to integrate a more appropriate concept of culture and human being in urban environments. Think about Koolhaas and his AMO/OMA, for instance, despite the fact that Koolhaas himself also struggles with the modernist mindset (see our introductions into “JunkSpace” or “The Generic City”). Yet, he at least recognized that something is fundamentally problematic with that.

7. The Toolbox Perspective

Most of the interesting and relevant systems are complex. It is simply a methodological fault to use frequencies of observational elements to describe these systems, whether we are dealing with animals, texts, urban environments or people (dogs, cats) moving around in urban environments.

Tools provide filters, they respond to certain issues, both of the signal and of the embedding. Tools are artifacts for transformation. As such they establish the relationality between actors, things and processes. Tools produce and establish Heidegger’s “Gestell” as well as they constitute the world as a fabric of relations as facts and acts, as Wittgenstein emphasized so often and already in the beginning of the Tractatus.

What we like to propose here is a more playful attitude towards the usage of tools, including formal methods. By “playful” we refer to Wittgenstein’s rule following, but also to a certain kind of experimentation, not induced by theory, but rather triggered by the know-how of some techniques that are going to be arranged. Tools as techniques, or techniques as tools are used to distil symbols from the available signals. Their relevancy is determined only by the subsequent step of classification, which in turn is (ortho-)regulated by strategic goal or cultural habits. Never, however, should we take a particular method as a representative for the means to access meaning from a process, let it a text or an urban environment.

8. Behavior

In this concluding chapter we are going to try to provide more details about our move to apply the concept of behavior to urbanism and computational linguistics.

Since Friedrich Schleiermacher in 1830ies, hermeneutics is emphasizing a certain kind of autonomy of the text. Of course, the text itself is not a living thing as we consider it for animals. Before it “awakes” it has to be entered into mind matter, or more generally, it has to be interpreted. Nevertheless, an autonomy of the text remains, largely due to the fact that there is no Private Language. The language is not owned by the interpreting mind. Vilem Flusser proposed to radically turn the perspective and to conceive the interpreter as medium for texts and other “information”, rather than the other way round.

Additionally, the working of the brain is complex, least to say. Our relation to our own brain and our own mind is more that of an observer than that of a user or even controller. We experience them. Both together, the externality of language and the (partial) autonomy of the brain-mind lead to an arrangement where the text becomes autonomous. It inherits complimentary parts of independence from both parts of the world, from the internal and the external.

Furthermore, human languages are unlimited in their productivity. It is not only unlimited, it also is extensible. This pairs with its already mentioned deep structure, not only concerning the grammatical structure. Using language, or better, mastering language means to play with the inevitable inner contradictions that appear across the various layers, levels, aspects and processes of applied language. Within practiced language, there are many time horizons, instantiated by structural and semantic pointers. These aspects render the original series of symbols into an associative network of active components, which contributes further to the autonomy of texts. Roland Barthes notes (in [17]) that

The Plural of the Text depends … not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the sterographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologically, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end.

Barthes implicitly emphasizes that the text does not convey a meaning, the meaning is not in the text, it can’t be conceived as something externalizable. In this essay he also holds that a text can’t be taken as just a single object. It is a text only in the context of other texts, and so the meaning that it develops upon interpretation is also dependent on the corpus into which it is embedded.

Methodologically, this (again) highlights the problematics that Alan Hajek called the reference class problem [13]. It is impossible for an interpreter to develop the meaning of a text outside of a previously chosen corpus. This dependency is inherited by any phrase, any sentence and any word within the text. Even a label like “IBM” that seems to be bijectively unique regarding the mapping of the graphem to its implied meaning is dependent on that. Of course, it will always refer somehow to the company. Yet, without the larger context it is not clear in any sense to which aspect of that company and its history the label refers to in a particular case. In literary theory this is called intertextuality. Further more, it is almost palpable here in this example that signs refer only to signs (the cornerstone of Peircean semiotics), and that concepts are nothing that could be defined (as we argued earlier in more detail).

We may settle here that a text as well as any part of it is established even through the selection of the embedding corpus, or likewise, a social practice, a life-form. Without such an embedding the text simply does not exist as a text. We just would find a series of graphemes. It is a hopeless exaggeration , if not self-deception, if people call the statistical treatment of texts “text mining”. reading it in another way, it may be considered even as a cynical term.

It is this dependence on local and global contexts, synchronically and diachronically, that renders the interpretation of a text similar to the interpretation of animal behavior.

Taken together, conceiving of texts as behaving systems is probably less a metaphor than it appears at first sight. Considering the way we make sense of a text, approaching a text is in many ways comparable with approaching an animal of a familiar species. We won’t know exactly what is going to happen, the course of events and action depends significantly on ourselves. The categories and ascribed properties necessary to establish an interaction are quite undefined in the beginning, also available only as types of rules, not as readily parameterized rules itself. And like in animals, the next approach will never be a simple repetition of the former one, even one knows the text quite good.

From the methodological perspective the significance of such a “behavioral turn”3 can’t be underestimated. For instance, nobody would interpret an animal by a rather short series of photographs, and keep the conclusion thereof once and for all. Interacting with a text as if it would behave demands for a completely different set of procedures. After all, one would deal with an open interaction. Such openness must be responded to with an appropriate attitude of the willingness for open structural learning.  This holds not only for human interpreters, but rather also for any interpreter, even if it would be software. In other words, the software dealing with text must itself be active in a non-analytical manner in order to constitute what we call a “text”. Any kind of algorithm (in the definition of Knuth) does not deal with text, but just and blindly with a series of dead graphemes.

The Urban

For completely different material reasons cities can be considered also as autonomous entities. Their patterns of growth and differentiation looks much more like that of ensembles of biological entities than that of minerals. Of course, this doesn’t justify the more or less naïve assignment of the “city as organism”. Urban arrangements are complex in the sense we’ve defined it, they are semiogenic and associative. There is a continuous contest between structure as regulation and automation on the one side and liquification as participation and symbolization on the other, albeit symbols may play for both parties.

Despite this autonomy, it remains a fact that without human activity cities are as little alive as texts are. This raises the particular question of the relationships between a city and its inhabitants, between the people as citizens of the city that they constitute. This topic has been subject of innumerable essay, novels, and investigations. Recently, a fresh perspective onto that has been opened by Vera Bühlmann’s notion of the “Quantum City”.[14]

We can neither detach the citizens from their city, not vice versa. Nevertheless, the standardized and externalized collective contribution across space and time creates an arrangement that produces dissipative flows and shows a strong meta-stability that transcends the activities of the individuals. This stability should not be mistaken as a “state”, though. Like for any other complex system, including texts, we should avoid to try to assign a “state” to a particular city, or even a part of it. Everything is a process within a complex system, even if it appears to be rather stable. yet, this stability depends on the perspective of the observer. In turn, the seeming stability does not mean that a city-process could not be destroyed by human activity, let it be by individuals (Nero), by a collective, or by socio-economic processes. Yet, again as in case of complex systems, the question of causality would be the wrong starting point for addressing the issue of change as it would be a statistical description.

Cities and urban environments are fabrics of relations between a wide range of heterogenic and heterotopic (See Foucault or David Shane [15]) entities and processes across a likewise large range of temporal scales, meeting any shade between the material and the immaterial. There is the activity of single individuals, of collectives of individuals, of legislative and other norms, the materiality of the buildings and their changing usage and roles, different kinds of flows and streams as well as stores and memories.

Elsewhere we argued that this fabric may be conceived as a dynamic ensemble of associative networks [16]. Those should be clearly distinguished from logistic networks, whose purpose is given by organizing any kind of physical transfer. Associative networks re-arrange, sort, classify and learn. Such, they are also the abstract location of the transposition of the material into the immaterial. Quite naturally, issues of form and their temporal structure arise, in other words, behavior.

Our suggestion thus is to conceive of a city as en entity that behaves. This proposal has (almost) nothing to do with the metaphor of the “city as organism”, a transfer that is by far too naïve. Changes in urban environments are best conceived as “outcomes” of probabilistic processes that are organized as overlapping series, both contingent and consistent. The method of choice to describe those changes is based on the notion of the generalized context.

Urban Text, Text and Urbanity, Textuality and Performance

Urban environments establish or even produce a particular kind of mediality. We need not invoke the recent surge of large screens in many cities for that. Any arrangement of facades encodes a rich semantics that is best described employing a semiotic perspective, just as Venturi proposed it. Recently, we investigated the relationship between facades, whether made from stone or from screens, and the space that they constitute [17].

There is yet another important dimension between the text and the city. For many hundred years now, if not even millenia, cities are not imaginable without text in one or the other form. Latest since the early 19th century, text and city became deeply linked to one another with the surge of newspapers and publishing houses, but also through the intricate linkage between the city and the theater. Urban culture is text culture, far more than it could be conceived as an image culture. This tendency is only intensified through the web, albeit urbanity now gets significantly transformed by and into the web-based aspects of culture. At least we may propose that there is a strong co-evolution between the urban (as entity and as concept) and mediality, whether it expresses itself as text, as movie or as webbing.

The relationship between the urban and the text has been explored many times. It started probably with Walter Benjamin’s “flâneur” (for an overview see [18]). Nowadays, urbanists often refer to the concept of the “readability” of a city layout, a methodological habit originated by Kevin Lynch. Yet, if we consider the relation between the urban and the textual, we certainly have to take an abstract concept of text, we definitely have to avoid the idea that there are items like characters or words out there in the city. I think, we should at least follow something like the abstract notion of textuality, as it has been devised by Roland Barthes in his “From Work to Text” [19] as a “methodological field”. Yet, this probably is still not abstract enough, as urban geographers like Henri Lefebvre mistook the concept of textuality as one of intelligibility [20]. Lefebvre obviously didn’t understand the working of a text. How should he, one might say, as a modernist (and marxist) geographer. All the criticism that was directed against the junction between the urban and textuality conceived—as far as we know—text as something object-like, something that is out there as such, awaiting passively to be read and still being passive as it is being read, finally maybe even as an objective representation beyond the need (and the freedom for) interpretation. This, of course, represents a rather limited view on textuality.

Above we introduced the concept of “behaving texts”, that is, texts as active entities. These entities become active as soon as they are mediatized with interpreters. Again: not the text is conceived as the media or in a media-format, but rather the interpreter, whether it is a human brain-mind or a a suitable software tat indeed is capable for interpreting, not just for pre-programmed and blind re-coding. This “behavioral turn” renders “reading” a text, but also “writing” it, into a performance. Performances, on the other hand, comprise always and inevitable a considerable openness, precisely because they let collide the immaterial and the material from the side of the immaterial. Such, performances are the counterpart of abstract associativity, yet also settling at the surface that sheds matter from ideas.

In the introduction to their nicely edited book ”Performance and the City” Kim Solga, D.Hopkins and Shelley Orr [18] write, citing the urban geographer Nigel Thrift:

Although de Certeau conceives of ‘walking in the city’ not just as a textual experience but as a ‘series’ of embodied, creative’ practices’ (Lavery: 152), a ‘spatial acting-out of place’ (de Certeau: 98, our emphasis), Thrift argues that de Certeau: “never really leaves behind the operations of reading and speech and the sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit claim that these operations can be extended to other practices. In turn, this claim [ … ] sets up another obvious tension, between a practice-based model of often illicit ‘behaviour’ founded on enunciative speech-acts and a text-based model of ‘representation’ which fuels functional social systems.” (Thrift 2004: 43)

Quite obviously, Thrift didn’t manage to get the right grip to Certeau’s proposal that textual experience may be conceived—I just repeat it— as a series of embodied, creative practices. It is his own particular blindness that lets Thrift denunciate texts as being mostly representational.

Solsa and colleagues indeed emphasize the importance of performance, not just in their introduction, but also through their editing of the book. Yet, they explicitly link textuality and performance as codependent cultural practices. They write:

While we challenge the notion that the city is a ‘text’ to be read and (re)written, we also argue that textuality and performativity must be understood as linked cultural practices that work together to shape the body of phenomenal, intellectual, psychic, and social encounters that frame a subject’s experience of the city. We suggest that the conflict, collision, and contestation between texts and acts provoke embodied struggles that lead to change and renewal over time. (p.6)

Such, we find a justification for our “behavioral turn” and its application to texts as well as to the urban from a rather different corner. Even more significant, Solsa et al. seem to agree that performativity and textuality could not be detached from the urban at all. Apparently, the urban as a particular quality of human culture more and more develops into the main representative of human culture.

Yet, neither text nor performance, nor their combination count for a full account of the mediality of the urban. As we already indicated above, the movie as kind of a cross-media from text, image, and performance is equally important.

The relations between film and the urban, between architecture and the film, are also quite wide-spread. The cinema, somehow the successor of the theatre, could be situated only within the city. From the opposite direction, many would consider a city without cinemas as being somehow incomplete. The co-evolutionary story between both is still being under vivid development, I think.

There is particularly one architect/urbanist who is able to blend the film and the building into each other. You may know him quite well, I refer to Rem Koolhaas. Everybody knows that he has been an experimental moviemaker in his youth. It is much less known that he deliberately organized at least one of his buildings as kind of a movie: The Embassy of the Netherlands in Berlin (cf. [21]).

Here, Koolhaas arranged the rooms along a dedicated script. Some of the views out of the window he even trademarked to protect them!

Figure 1: Rem Koolhaas, Dutch Embassy, Berlin. The figure shows the script of pathways as a collage (taken from [21]).

9. The Behavioral Turn

So far we have shown how the behavioral turn could be supported and which are some of the first methodological consequences, if we embrace it. Yet, the picture developed so far is not complete, of course.

If we accept the almost trivial concept that autonomous entities are best conceived as behaving entities—remember that autonomy implies complexity—, then we further can ask about the structure of the relationship between the behaving subject and its counterpart, whether this is also a behaving subject or whether it is conceived more like passive object. For Bruno Latour, for instance, both together form a network, thereby blurring the categorical distinction between both.

Most descriptions of the process of getting into touch with something nowadays is dominated by the algorithmic perspective of computer software. Even Designer started to speak about interfaces. The German term for the same thing—“Schnittstelle”—is even more pronounced and clearly depicts the modernist prejudice in dealing with interaction. “Schnittstelle” implies that something, here the relation, is cut into two parts. A complete separation between interacting entities is assumed apriori. Such a separation is deeply inappropriate, since it would work only in strictly standardized environments, up to being programmed algorithmically. Precisely this was told us over and over again by designers of software “user interfaces”. Perhaps here we can find the reason for so many bad designs, not only concerning software. Fortunately, though just through a slow evolutionary process, things improve more and more. So-called “user-centric” design, or “experience-oriented” design became more abundant in recent years, but their conceptual foundation is still rather weak, or a wild mixture of fashionable habits and strange adaptations of cognitive science.

Yet, if we take the primacy of interpretation serious, and combine it with the “behavioral turn” we can see a much more detailed structure than just two parts cut apart.

The consequence of such a combination is that we would drop the idea of a clear-cut surface even for passive objects. Rather, we could conceive objects as being stuffed with a surrounding field that becomes stronger the closer we approach the object. By means of that field we distinguish the “pure” physicality from the semiotically and behaviorally active aspects.

This field is a simple one for stone-like matter, but even there it is still present. The field becomes much more rich, deep and vibrant if the entity is not a more or less passive object, but rather an active and autonomous subject. Such as an animal, a text, or a city. The reason being that there are no apriori and globally definable representative criteria that we could use to approach such autonomous entities. We only can know about more or less suitable procedures about how to derive such criteria in the particular case, approaching a particular individual {text, city}. The missing of such criteria is a direct correlate for their semantic productivity, or, likewise, for their unboundedness.

Approaching a semantically productive entity—such entities are also always able to induce new signs, they are semiosic entities—is reminds to approaching a gravitational field. Yet it is also very different from a gravitational field, since our semio-behavioral field shows increasing structural richness the closer the entities approach to each other. It is quite obvious that only by means of such a semio-behavioral field we can close the gap between the subject and the world that has been opened, or at least deepened by the modernist contributions from the times of Descartes until late computer science. Only upon a concept like the semio-behavioral field, which in turn is a consequence of the behavioral turn, we can overcome the existential fallacy as it has been purported and renewed over and over again by the dual pair of material and immaterial. The language game that separates the material and immaterial inevitably leads into the nonsensical abyss of existentialism. Dual concepts always come with tremendous costs, as they prevent any differentiated way of speaking about the matter. For instance, it prevents to recognize the materiality of symbols, or more precisely, the double-articulation of symbols between the more material and the more immaterial aspects of the world.

The following series of images may be taken as a metaphorical illustration of that semio-behavioral field. We call it the zona extima of the behavioral coating of entities.

Figure 2a: The semio-behavioral field around an entity.

Figure 2b: The situation as another entity approaches perceptively.

Figure 2c: Mutual penetration of semio-behavioral fields.

Taken together we may say, that whenever {sb,sth} gets into contact with {sb, sth}, we do so through the behavioral coating. This zone is of contact is not intimate (as Peter Sloterdijk describes it), it is rather extimate, though there is a smooth and graded change of quality from extimacy to intimacy as the distance decreases. The zona extima is a borderless (topological) field, driven by purposes (due to modelling), it is medial, behaviorally  choreographed as negotiation, exposure, call & request.

The concept of extimation, or also the process of extimating, is much more suitable than “interaction” to describe what‘s going on when we act, behave, engage, actively perceive, encounter with or towards the other. The interesting thing with the web-based media is that some aspects of zona extima can be transferred.

10. Conclusion

In this essay we try to argument in favor of a behavioral turn as a general attitude when it comes to conceive the interaction of any kind of two entities. The behavioral turn is a consequence of three major and interrelated assumptions:

  • – primacy of interpretation in the relation to the world;s;
  • – primacy of process and relation against matter and point;
  • – complexity and associativity in strongly mediatized environments.

All three assumptions are strictly outside of anything that phenomenological, positivist or modernist approaches can talk about or even practice.

It particularly allows to overcome the traditional and strict separation between the material and the immaterial, as well as the separation between the active and the passive. These shifts can’t be underestimated; they have far-reaching consequences upon the way we practice and conceive our world.

The behavioral turn is the consequence of a particular attitude that respects the bi-valency of world as a dynamic system of populations of relations. It is less the divide between the material and the immaterial, which anyway is somewhat an illusion deriving from the metaphysical claim of the possibility of essences. For instance, the jump that occurs between the realms of the informational and the causal establishes as a pair of two complimentary but strictly and mutually exclusive modes of speaking about the orderliness in the world. In some way, it is also the orderliness in the behavior of the observer—as repetition—that creates the informational that the observer than may perceive. The separation is thus a highly artificial one, in either direction. It is simply silly to discuss the issue of causality without referring to the informational aspects (for a full discussion of the issue see this essay). In any real-world case we always find both aspects together, and we find it as behavior.

Actually, the bi-valent aspect that I mentioned before refers to something quite different, in fact so different that we even can’t speak properly about it. It refers to these aspects that are apriori to modeling or any other comprehension, that are even outside to the performance of the individual itself. What I mean is the resistance of existential arrangements, inclusive the body that the comprehending entity is partially built from. This existential resistance introduces something like outer space for the cultural sphere. Needless to say that we can exist only within this cultural sphere. Yet, any action upon the world enforces us to take a short trip into the vacuum, and if we are lucky the re-entrance is even productive. We may well expect an intensification of the aspect of the virtual, as we argued here. Far from being suitable to serve as a primacy (as existentialism misunderstood the issue), the existential resistance, the absolute outside, enforces us to bark on the concept of behavior. Only “behavior” as a perceptional and performative attitude allows to extract coherence from the world without neglecting the fact of that resistance or contumacy.

The behavioral turn triggers a change in the methodology for empiric investigations as well. The standard set of methods for empiric descriptions changes, using the relation and the coherent series always as the starting point, best in its probabilized form, that is, as generalized probabilistic context. This also prevents the application of statistical methods directly to raw data. There should always be some kind of grouping or selection preceding the statistical reasoning. Otherwise we would try to follow the route that Wittgenstein blocked as a “wrong usage of symbols” (in his rejection of the reasonability of Russel/Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica). The concept of abstract behavior inclusive the advanced methodology that avoids to start with representational symbolification is clearly a sound way out of this deep problem from which any positivist empiric investigation suffers.

Interaction, including any action upon some other entity, when understood within the paradigm of behavior, becomes a recurrent, though not repetitive, self-adjusting process. During this process means and symbols may change and be replaced all the way down until a successful handshake. There is no objectivity in this process other than the mutual possibility for anticipation. Despite the existential resistance and contumacy that is attached to any re-shaping of the world, and even more so if we accomplish it by means of tools, this anticipation is, of course, greatly improved upon the alignment to cultural standards, contributing to the life-world as a shared space of immanence.

This provides us finally a sufficiently abstract, but also a sufficiently rich or manifold perspective on the issue of the roles of symbols regarding the text, the urban and the anime, the animal-like. None of those could be comprehended without first creating a catalog or a system of symbols. These symbols, both material and immaterial and thus kind of a hinge, a double-articulation, are rooted both in the embedding culture (as a de-empirifying selective force) and the individual, which constitutes another double-articulation. The concept of abstract behavior, given as a set of particular conditions and attitudes, allows to respond appropriately to the symbolic.

The really big question concerning our choreostemic capabilities—and those of the alleged machinic—therefore is: How to achieve the fluency in dealing with the symbolic without presuming it as a primary entity? Probably by exercising observing. I hope that the suggestions expressed so far in these essay provide some robust starting points. …we will see.

1. Here we simply cite the term of “information retrieval”, we certainly do not agree that the term is a reasonable one, since it is deeply infected by positivist prejudices. “Information” can’t be retrieved, because it is not “out there”. Downloading a digitally encoded text is neither a hunting nor a gathering for information, because information can’t be considered to be an object. Information is only present during the act of interpretation (more details about the status of information you can find here). Actually, what we are doing is simply “informationing”.

2. The notion of a “behavioral turn” is known from geography since the late 1960ies [22][23], and also from economics. In both fields, however, the behavioral aspect is related to the individual human being. In both areas, any level of abstraction with regard to the concept of behavior is missing. Quite in contrast to those movements, we do not focus on the neglect of the behavioral domain when it comes to human society, but rather the transfer of the abstract notion of behavior to non-living entities.

Another reference to “behavioral sciences” can be found in social sciences. Yet, in social sciences “behavioral” is often reduced to “behaviorist”, which of course is nonsense. A similar misunderstanding is abundant in political sciences.

3. Note that the proposed „behavioral turn“ should not be mistaken as a “behavioristic” move, as sort of a behaviorism. We strictly reject the stimulus-response scheme of the behaviorism. Actually, behaviorism as it has been developed by Watson and Pavlov has only little to do with behavior at all. It is nothing else than an overt reductionist program, rendering any living being into a trivial machine. Unfortunately, the primitive scheme of behaviorism is experiencing kind of a come-back in so-called “Behavioral Design”, where people talk about “triggers” much in the same way as Pavlov did (c.f. BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model).

  • [2] G. Moran, J.C. Fentress (1979). A Search for Order in Wolf Social Behavior. pp.245-283. in: E. Klinghammer (ed.), The Behavior and Ecology of Wolves. Symp. held on 23-24.5.1975 in Wilmington N.C.), Garland STPM Press, New York..
  • [3] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and repetitionGilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.
  • [4] J.A.R.A.M. Van Hooff (1982). Categories and sequences of behaviour: methods of description and analysis. in: Handbook of methods in nonverbal behavior research (K.R. Scherer& P. Ekman, eds). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
  • [5] P.G.M. van der Heijden, H. de Vries, J.A.R.A.M. van Hooff (1990). Correspondence analysis of transition matrices, with special attention to missing entries and asymmetry. Anim.Behav. 40: 49-64.
  • [6] Teuvo Kohonen, Samuel Kaski, K. Lagus und J. Honkela (1996). Very Large Two-Level SOM for the Browsing of Newsgroups. In: C. von der Malsburg, W. von Seelen, J. C. Vorbrüggen and B. Sendhoff, Proceedings of ICANN96, International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks, Bochum, Germany, July 16-19, 1996, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1112, pp.269-274. Springer, Berlin.
  • [7] Hecht-Nielsen (1994).
  • [8] Javier Rojo Tuan, S. Nguyen (2010). Improving the Johnson-Lindenstrauss Lemma. available online.
  • [9] Sanjoy Dasgupta, Presentation given about: Samuel Kaski (1998), Dimensionality Reduction by Random Mapping: Fast Similarity Computation for Clustering, Helsinki University of Technology 1998. available online.
  • [10] Michel Serres, Nayla Farouki. Le trésor. Dictionnaire des sciences. Falmamrion, Paris 1998. p.394.
  • [11] Bill Hillier, Space Syntax. E-edition, 2005.
  • [12] Bill Hillier (2009). The City as a Socio-technical System: a spatial reformulation in the light of the levels problem and the parallel problem. Keynote paper to the Conference on Spatial Information Theory, September 2009.
  • [14] Vera Bühlmann (2012). In the Quantum City – design, and the polynomial grammaticality of artifacts. forthcoming.
  • [15] David G. Shane. Recombinant Urbanism. 2005.
  • [18] D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr and Kim Solga (eds.), Performance and the City. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2009.
  • [19] Roland Barthes, From Work to Text. in: Image, Music, text: Essay Selected and translated. Transl. Stephen Heath, Hill&Wang, New York 1977. also available online @ google books p.56.
  • [20] Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space. 1979.
  • [21] Vera Bühlmann. Inhabiting media. Thesis, University of Basel (CH) 2009.
  • [22] Kevin R Cox, Jennifer Wolch and Julian Wolpert (2008). Classics in human geography revisited. “Wolpert, J. 1970: Departures from the usual environment in locational analysis. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 50, 220–29.” Progress in Human Geography (2008) pp.1–5.
  • [23] Dennis Grammenos. Urban Geography. Encyclopedia of Geography. 2010. SAGE Publications. 1 Oct. 2010. available online.

Junkspace, extracted.

July 16, 2012 § Leave a comment

Some years after “The Generic City” Koolhaas published

Précis of “Junkspace”

2. Junkspace is the sum total of our current achievement;

5. Continuity is the essence of Junkspace.

10. Junkspace’s modules are dimensioned to carry brands;

19. Each element performs its task in negotiated isolation.

20. Instead of development, it offers entropy.

38. Junkspace will be our tomb.

47. Junkspace is space as vacation;

52. Junkspace can be airborne, bring malaria to Sussex;

54. It does not signify beauty, but guilt.

Latest here we have to address the question:
What is the problem with modernism?

This will be the topic of the next post.

The Text Machine

July 10, 2012 § Leave a comment

  • – there are rich organizational constraints, e.g. grammars

Dealing with a Large World

June 10, 2012 § Leave a comment

The world as an imaginary totality of all actual and virtual

relationships between assumed entities can be described in innumerable ways. Even what we call a “characteristic” forms only in a co-dependent manner together with the formation processes of entities and relationships. This fact is particularly disturbing if we encounter something for the first time, without the guidance provided by more or less applicable models, traditions, beliefs or quasi-material constraints. Without those means any selection out of all possible or constructible properties is doomed to be fully contingent, subject to pure randomness.

Yet, this does not result in results that are similarly random. Given that the equipment with tools and methods is given for a task or situation at hand, modeling is for the major part the task to reduce the infiniteness of possible selections in such a way that the resulting representation can be expected to be helpful. Of course, this “utility” is not a hard measure in itself. It is not only dependent on the subjective attitude to risk, mainly the model risk and the prediction risk, utility is also relative to the scale of the scope, in other words, whether one is interested in motor or other purely physical aspects, tactical aspects or strategic aspects, whether one is interested in more local or global aspects, both in time and space, or whether one is interested in any kind of balanced mixture of those aspects. Establishing such a mixture is a modeling task in itself, of course, albeit one that is often accomplished only implicitly.

The randomness mentioned above is a direct corollary of the empirical underdetermination1. From a slightly different perspective, we also may say that it is an inevitable consequence of the primacy of interpretation. And we also should not forget that language and particularly metaphors in language—and any kind of analogical thinking as well—are means to deal constructively with that randomness, turning physical randomness into contingency. Even within the penultimate guidance of predictivity—it is only a soft guidance though—large parts of what we reasonably could conceive as facts (as temporarily fixed arrangement of relations) is mere collaborative construction, an ever undulating play between the individual and the general.
Even if analogical thinking indeed is the cornerstone, if not the Acropolis, of human mindedness, it is always preceded by and always rests upon modeling. Only a model allows to pick some aspect out of the otherwise unsorted impressions taken up from the “world”. In previous chapters we already discussed quite extensively the various general as well as some technical aspects of modeling, from an abstract as well as from a practical perspective.2  Here we focus on a particular challenge, the selection task regarding the basic descriptors used to set up a particular model.

Well, given a particular modeling task we have the practical challenge to reduce a large set of pre-specific properties into a small set of “assignates” that together represent in some useful way the structure of the dynamics of the system that we’d observed. How to reduce a set of properties created by observation that comprises several hundreds of them?
The particular challenge arises even in the case of linear systems if we try to avoid subjective “cut-off” points that are buried deeply into the method we use. Such heuristic means are wide-spread in statistically based methods. The bad thing about that is that you can’t control their influence onto the results. Since the task comprises the selection of properties for the description of the entities (prototypes) to be formed, such arbitrary thresholds, often justified or even enforced just by the method itself, will exert a profound influence on the semantic level. In other words it corroborates its own assumption of neutrality.

Yet, we also never should assume linearity of a system, because most of the interesting real systems are non-linear, even in the case of trivial machines. Brute force approaches are not possible, because the number of possible models is 2^n, with n the number of properties or variables. Non-linear models can’t be extrapolated from known ones, of course. The Laplacean demon3 became completely wrapped by Thomean folds4, being even quite worried by things like Turing’s formal creativity5.

When dealing with observations from “non-linear entities”, we are faced with the necessity to calculate and evaluate any selection of variables explicitly. Assuming a somewhat phantastic figure of 0.0000001 seconds (10e-6) needed to calculate a single model, we still would need 10E15 years to visit all models if we would have to deal with just 100 variables. To make it more palpable: It would take 80 million times longer than the age of the earth, which is roughly 4.8 billion years…

Obviously, we have to drop the idea that we can “proof” the optimality of a particular model. The only thing we can do is to minimize the probability that within a given time T we can find a better model. On the other hand, the data are not of unbounded complexity, since real systems are not either. There are regularities, islands of stability, so to speak. There is always some structure, otherwise the system would not persist as an observable entity. As a consequence, we can organize the optimization of “failure time probability”, we may even consider this as a second-order optimization. We may briefly note that the actual task thus is not only to select a proper set of variables, we also should identify the relations between the observed and constructed variables. Of course, there are always several if not many sets of variables that we could consider as “proper”, precisely for the reason that they form a network of relations, even if this network is probabilistic in nature and itself being kind of a model.

So, how to organize this optimization? Basically, everything has to be organized as nested, recurrent processes. The overall game we could call learning. Yet, it should be clear that every “move” and every fixation of some parameter and its value is nothing else than a hypothesis. There is no “one-shot-approach”, and no linear progression either.
If we want to avoid naive assumptions—and any assumption that remains untested is de facto a naive assumption—we have to test them. Everything is trial and error, or expressed in a more educated manner, everything has to be conceived as a hypothesis. Consequently we can reduce the number of variables only by a recurrent mechanism. As a lemma we conclude that any approach that reduces the number of variables not in a recurrent fashion can’t be conceived as a sound approach.

Contingent Collinearities

It is the structuredness of the observed entity that cause the similarity of any two observations across all available or apriori chosen properties. We also may expect that any two variables could be quite “similar”6 across all available observations. This provides the first two opportunities for reducing the size of the problem. Note that such reduction by “black-listing” applies only to the first steps in a recurrent process. Once we have evidence that certain variables do not contribute to the predictivity of our model, we may loosen the intensity of any of the reductions! Instead of removing it from the space of expressibility we may preferably achieve a weighted preference list in later stages of modeling.
So, if we find n observations or variables being sufficiently collinear, we could remove a portion p(n) from this set, or we could compress them by averaging.
R1: reduction by removing or compressing collinear records.
R2: reduction by removing or compressing collinear variables.
A feasible criterion for assessing the collinearity is the monotonicity in the relationship between two variables as it is reflected by Spearman’s correlation. We also could apply K-means clustering using all variables, then averaging all observations that are “sufficiently close” to the center of the clusters.
Albeit the respective thresholding is only a preliminary tactical move, we should be aware of the problematics we introduce by such a reduction. Firstly, it is the size of the problem that brings in a notion of irreversibility, even if we are fully aware of the preliminarity. Secondly, R1 is indeed critical because it is in some quite obvious way a petitio principii. Even tiny differences in some variables could be masked by larger differences in such variables that penultimately are recognized as irrelevant. Hence, very tight constraints should be applied when performing R1.
When removing collinear records we else have to care about the outcome indicator. Often, the focused outcome is much less frequent than its “opposite”. Preferably, we should remove records that are marked as negative outcome, up to a ratio of 1:1 between positive and negative outcome in the reduced data. Such “adaptive” sampling is similar to so-called “biased sampling”.

Directed Collinearities

Additionally to those two collinearities there is a third one, which is related to the purpose of the model. Variables that do not contribute to the predictive reconstruction of the outcome we could call “empirically empty”.

R3: reduction by removing empirically empty variables

Modeling without a purpose can’t be considered to be modeling at all7, so we always have a target variable available that reflects the operationalization of the focused outcome. We could argue that only those variables are interesting for a detailed inspection that are collinear to the target variable.

Yet, that’s a problematic argument, since we need some kind of model to draw the decision whether to exclude a variable or not, based on some collinearity measure. Essentially, that model claims to predict the predictivity of the final model, which of course is not possible. Any such apriori “determination” of the contribution of a variable to the final predictivity of a model is nothing else than a very preliminary guess. Thus, we indeed should treat it just as a guess, i.e. we should consider it as a propensity weight for selecting the variable. In the first explorative steps, however, we could choose an aggressive threshold, causing the removal of many variables from the vector.

R1 removes redundancy across observations. The same effect can be achieved by a technique called “bagging”, or similarly “foresting”. In both cases a comparatively small portion of the observations are taken to build a “small” model, where the “bag” or “forest” of all small models then are taken to build the final, compound model. Bagging as a technique of “split & reduce” can be applied also in the variable domain.

R4: reduction of complexity by splitting

Once an acceptable model or set of models has been built, we can check the postponed variables one after another. In the case of splitting, the confirmation is implicitly performed by weighting the individual small models.

Compression and Redirection

Elsewhere we already discussed the necessity and the benefits of separating the transformation of data from the association of observations. If we separate it, we can see that everything we need is an improvement or a preservation of the potential distinguishability of observations. The associative mechanism need not to “see” anything that even comes close to the raw data, as long as the resulting association of observations results in a proper derivation of prototypes.8

This opens the possibility for a compression of the observations, e.g. by the technique of random projection. Random projection maps vector spaces onto each other. If the dimensionality of the resulting vector of reduced size remains large enough (100+), then the separability of the vectors is kept intact. The reason is that in a high-dimensional vector space almost all vectors are “orthogonal” to each other. In other words, random projection does not change the structure of the relations between vectors.

R5: reduction by compression

During the first explorative steps one could construct a vector space of d=50, which allows a rather efficient exploration without introducing too much noise. Noise in normalized vector space essentially means to change the “direction” of the vectors, the effect of changing the length of vectors due to random projection is much less profound. Else note that introducing noise is not a bad thing at all: it helps to avoid overfitting, resulting in more robust models.

If we conceive of this compression by means of random projection as a transformation, we could store the matrix of random numbers as parameters of that transformation. We then could apply it in any subsequent classification task, i.e. when we would apply the model to new observations. Yet, The transformation by random projection destroys the semantic link between observed variables and the predictivity of the model. Any of the columns after such a compression contains information from more than one of the input variables. In order to support understanding, we have to reconstruct the semantic link.
That’s fortunately not a difficult task, albeit it is only possibly if we use an index that allows to identify the observations even after the transformation. The result of the building the model is a collection of groups of records, or indices, respectively. Based on these indices we simply identify those variables, which minimize the ratio of variance within the groups to the variance of the means per variable across the groups. This provides us the weights for the list of all variables, which can be used to drastically reduce the list of input variables for the final steps of modeling.

The whole approach could be described as sort of a redirection procedure. We first neglect the linkage between semantics of individual variables and prediction in order to reduce the size of the task, then after having determined the predictivity we restore the neglected link.
This opens the road for an even more radical redirection path. We already mentioned that all we need to preserve through transformation is the distinguishability of the observations without distorting the vectors too much. This could be accomplished not only by random projection though. If we’d interpret large vectors as a coherent “event” we can represent them by the coefficients of wavelets, built from individual observations. The only requirement is that the observations consist from a sufficiently large number of variables, typically n>500.

Compression is particularly useful, if the properties, i.e. the observed variables do not bear much semantic value in itself, as it is the case in image analysis, analysis of raw sensory data, or even in case of the modeling of textual information.

In this small essay we described five ways to reduce large sets of variables, or “assignates” (link) as they are called more appropriately. Since for pragmatic reasons a petitio principii can’t be avoided in attempting such a reduction, mainly due to the inevitable fact that we need a method for it, the reduction should be organized as a process that decreases the uncertainty in assigning a selection probability to the variables.

Regardless the kind of mechanism to associate observations into groups and forming thereby the prototypes, a separation of transformation and association is mandatory for such a recurrent organization being possible.

1. Quine  [1]

2. see: the abstract model, modeling and category theory, technical aspects of modeling, transforming data;

3. The “Laplacean Demon” refers to Laplace’s belief that if all parts of the universe could be measured the future development of the universe could be calculated. Such it is the paradigmatic label for determinism. Today we know that even IF we could measure everything in the universe with arbitrary precision we (what we could not, of course) we even could NOT pre-calculate the further development of the universe. The universe does not develop, it performs an open evolution.

4. Rene Thom [2] was the first to explicate the mathematical theory of folds in parameter space, which was dubbed “catastrophe theory” in order to reflect the subjects experience moving around in folded parameter spaces.

5. Alan Turing not only laid the foundations of deterministic machines for performing calculations; he also derived as the first one the formal structure of self-organization [3]. Based on this formal insights we can design the degree of creativity of a system.

impossibility to know for sure is the first and basic reason for culture.

6. note that determining similarity also requires apriori decisions about methods and scales, that need to be confirmed. In other words we always have to start with a belief.

7. Modeling without a purpose can’t be considered to be modeling at all. Performing a clusterization by means of some algorithm is not creating a model until we do not use it, e.g. in order to get some impression. Yet, as soon as we indeed take a look following some goal we imply a purpose. Unfortunately, in this case we would be enslaved by the hidden parameters built into the method. Things like unsupervised modeling, or “just clustering” always implies hidden targets and implicit optimization criteria, determined by the method itself. Hence, such things can’t be regarded as a reasonable move in data analysis.

8. This sheds an interesting light to the issue of “representation”, which we could not follow here.

  • [1] WvO Quine. Two Dogmas of Empiricism.
  • [2] Rene Thom. Catastrophe Theory
  • [3] Alan Turing (1956) Chemical basis of Morphogenesis

Prolegomena to a Morphology of Experience

May 2, 2012 § Leave a comment

Experience is a fundamental experience.

The very fact of this sentence demonstrates that experience differs from perception, much like phenomena are different from objects. It also demonstrates that there can’t be an analytic treatment or even solution of the question of experience. Experience is not only related to sensual impressions, but also to affects, activity, attention1 and associations. Above all, experience is deeply linked to the impossibility to know anything for sure or, likewise, apriori. This insight is etymologically woven into the word itself: in Greek, “peria” means “trial, attempt, experience”, influencing also the roots of “experiment” or “peril”.

In this essay we will focus on some technical aspects that are underlying the capability to experience. Before we go in medias res, I have to make clear the rationale for doing so, since, quite obviously so, experience could not be reduced to those said technical aspects, to which for instance modeling belongs. Experience is more than the techné of sorting things out [1] and even more than the techné of the genesis of discernability, but at the same time it plays a particular, if not foundational role in and for the epistemic process, its choreostemic embedding and their social practices.

Epistemic Modeling

As usual, we take the primacy of interpretation as one of transcendental conditions, that is, it is a condition we can‘t go beyond, even on the „purely“ material level. As a suitable operationalization of this principle, still a quite abstract one and hence calling for situative instantiation, we chose the abstract model. In the epistemic practice, the modeling does not, indeed, even never could refer to data that is supposed to „reflect“ an external reality. If we perform modeling as a pure technique, we are just modeling, but creating a model for whatsoever purpose, so to speak „modeling as such“, or purposed modeling, is not sufficient to establish an epistemic act, which would include the choice of the purpose and the choice of the risk attitude. Such a reduction is typical for functionalism, or positions that claim a principle computability of epistemic autonomy, as for instance the computational theory of mind does.

Quite in contrast, purposed modeling in epistemic individuals already presupposes the transition from probabilistic impressions to propositional, or say, at least symbolic representation. Without performing this transition from potential signals, that is mediated „raw“ physical fluctuations in the density of probabilities, to the symbolic it is impossible to create a structure, let it be for instance a feature vector as a set of variably assigned properties, „assignates“, as we called it previously. Such a minimal structure, however, is mandatory for purposed modeling. Any (re)presentation of observations to a modeling methods thus is already subsequent to prior interpretational steps.

Our abstract model that serves as an operationalization of the transcendental principle of the primacy of interpretation thus must also provide, or comprise, the transition from differences into proto-symbols. Proto-symbols are not just intensions or classes, they are so to speak non-empiric classes that have been derived from empiric ones by means of idealization. Proto-symbols are developed into symbols by means of the combination of naming and an associated practice, i.e a repeating or reproducible performance, or still in other words, by rule-following. Only on the level of symbols we then may establish a logic, or claiming absolute identity. Here we also meet the reason for the fact that in any real-world context a “pure” logic is not possible, as there are always semantic parts serving as a foundation of its application. Speaking about “truth-values” or “truth-functions” is meaningless, at least. Clearly, identity as a logical form is a secondary quality and thus quite irrelevant for the booting of the capability of experience. Such extended modeling is, of course, not just a single instance, it is itself a multi-leveled thing. It even starts with the those properties of the material arrangement known as body that allow also an informational perspective. The most prominent candidate principle of such a structure is the probabilistic, associative network.

Epistemic modeling thus consists of at least two abstract layers: First, the associative storage of random contexts (see also the chapter “Context” for their generalization), where no purpose is implied onto the materially pre-processed signals, and second, the purposed modeling. I am deeply convinced that such a structure is only way to evade the fallacy of representationalism2. A working actualization of this abstract bi-layer structure may comprise many layers and modules.

Yet, once one accepts the primacy of interpretation, and there is little to say against it, if anything at all, then we are lead directly to epistemic modeling as a mandatory constituent of any interpretive relationship to the world, for primitive operations as well as for the rather complex mental life we experience as humans, with regard to our relationships to the environment as well as with regard to our inner reality. Wittgenstein emphasized in his critical solipsism that the conception of reality as inner reality is the only reasonable one [3]. Epistemic modeling is the only way to keep meaningful contact with the external surrounds.

The Bridge

In its technical parts experience is based on an actualization of epistemic modeling. Later we will investigate the role and the usage of these technical parts in detail. Yet, the gap between modeling, even if conceived as an abstract, epistemic modeling, and experience is so large that we first have to shed some light on the bridge between these concepts. There are some other issues with experience than just the mere technical issues of modeling that are not less relevant for the technical issues, too.

Experience comprises both more active and more passive aspects, both with regard to performance and to structure. Both dichotomies must not be taken as ideally separated categories, of course. Else, the basic distinction into active and passive parts is not a new one either. Kant distinguished receptivity and spontaneity as two complementary faculties that combine in order to bring about what we call cognition. Yet, Leibniz, in contrast, emphasized the necessity of activity even in basic perception; nowadays, his view has been greatly confirmed by the research on sensing in organic (animals) as well as in in-organic systems (robots). Obviously, the relation between activity and passivity is not a simple one, as soon as we are going to leave the bright spheres of language.3

In the structural perspective, experience unfolds in a given space that we could call the space of experiencibility4. That space is spanned, shaped and structured by open and dynamic collections of any kind of theory, model, concept or symbol as well as by the mediality that is “embedding” those. Yet, experience also shapes this space itself. The situation reminds a bit to the relativistic space in physics, or the social space in humans, where the embedding of one space into another one will affect both participants, the embedded as well as the embedding space. These aspects we should keep in mind for our investigation of questions about the mechanisms that contribute to experience and the experience of experience. As you can see, we again refute any kind of ontological stances even to their smallest degrees.5

Now when going to ask about experience and its genesis, there are two characteristics of experience that enforce us to avoid the direct path. First, there is the deep linkage of experience to language. We must get rid of language for our investigation in order to avoid the experience of finding just language behind the language or what we call upfront “experience”; yet, we also should not forget about language either. Second, there is the self-referentiality of the concept of experience, which actually renders it into a strongly singular term. Once there are even only tiny traces of the capability for experience, the whole game changes, burying the initial roots and mechanisms that are necessary for the booting of the capability.

Thus, our first move consists in a reduction and linearization, which we have to catch up with later again, of course. We will achieve that by setting everything into motion, so-to-speak. The linearized question thus is heading towards the underlying mechanisms6:

How do we come to believe that there are facts in the world? 7

What are—now viewed from the outside of language8—the abstract conditions and the practiced moves necessary and sufficient for the actualization of such statements?

Usually, the answer will refer to some kind of modeling. Modeling provides the possibility for the transition from the extensional epistemic level of particulars to the intensional epistemic level of classes, functions or categories. Yet, modeling does not provide sufficient reason for experience. Sure, modeling is necessary for it, but it is more closely related to perception, though also not being equivalent to it. Experience as a kind of cognition thus can’t be conceived as kind of a “high-level perception”, quite contrary to the suggestion of Douglas Hofstadter [4]. Instead, we may conceive experience, in a first step, as the result and the activity around the handling of the conditions of modeling.

Even in his earliest writings, Wittgenstein prominently emphasized that it is meaningless to conceive of the world as consisting from “objects”. The Tractatus starts with the proposition:

The world is everything that is the case.

Cases, in the Tractatus, are states of affairs that could be made explicit into a particular (logical) form by means of language. From this perspective one could derive the radical conclusion that without language there is no experience at all. Despite we won’t agree to such a thesis, language is a major factor contributing to some often unrecognized puzzles regarding experience. Let us very briefly return to the issue of language.

Language establishes its own space of experiencibility, basically through its unlimited expressibility that induces hermeneutic relationships. Probably mainly to this particular experiential sphere language is blurring or even blocking clear sight to the basic aspects of experience. Language can make us believe that there are phenomena as some kind of original stuff, existing “independently” out there, that is, outside the human cognition.9 Yet, there is no such thing like a phenomenon or even an object that would “be” before experience, and for us humans even not before or outside of language. It is even not reasonable to speak about phenomena or objects as if they would exist before experience. De facto, it is almost non-sensical to do so.

Both, objects as specified entities and phenomena at large are consequences of interpretation, in turn deeply shaped by cultural imprinting, and thus heavily depending on language. Refuting that consequence would mean to refute the primacy of interpretation, which would fall into one of the categories of either naive realism or mysticism. Phenomenology as an ontological philosophical discipline is nothing but a mis-understanding (as ontology is henceforth); since phenomenology without ontological parts must turn into some kind of Wittgensteinian philosophy of language, it simply vanishes. Indeed, when already being teaching in Cambridge, Wittgenstein once told a friend to report his position to the visiting Schlick, whom he refused to meet on this occasion, as “You could say of my work that it is phenomenology.” [5] Yet, what Wittgenstein called “phenomenology” is completely situated inside language and its practicing, and despite there might be a weak Kantian echo in his work, he never supported Husserl’s position of synthetic universals apriori. There is even some likelihood that Wittgenstein, strongly feeling to be constantly misunderstood by the members of the Vienna Circle, put this forward in order to annoy Schlick (a bit), at least to pay him back in kind.

Quite in contrast, in a Wittgensteinian perspective facts are sort of collectively compressed beliefs about relations. If everybody believes to a certain model of whatever reference and of almost arbitrary expectability, then there is a fact. This does not mean, however, that we get drowned by relativism. There are still the constraints implied by the (unmeasured and unmeasurable) utility of anticipation, both in its individual and its collective flavor. On the other hand, yes, this indeed means that the (social) future is not determined.

More accurately, there is at least one fact, since the primacy of interpretation generates at least the collectivity as a further fact. Since facts are taking place in language, they do not just “consist” of content (please excuse such awful wording), there is also a pragmatics, and hence there are also at least two different grammars, etc.etc.

How do we, then, individually construct concepts that we share as facts? Even if we would need the mediation by a collective, a large deal of the associative work takes place in our minds. Facts are identifiable, thus distinguishable and enumerable. Facts are almost digitized entities, they are constructed from percepts through a process of intensionalization or even idealization and they sit on the verge of the realm of symbols.

Facts are facts because they are considered as being valid, let it be among a collective of people, across some period of time, or a range of material conditions. This way they turn into kind of an apriori from the perspective of the individual, and there is only that perspective. Here we find the locus situs of several related misunderstandings, such as direct realism, Husserlean phenomenology, positivism, the thing as such, and so on. The fact is even synthetic, either by means of “individual”10 mental processes or by the working of a “collective reasoning”. But, of course, it is by no means universal, as Kant concluded on the basis of Newtonian science, or even as Schlick did in 1930 [6]. There is neither a universal real fact, nor a particular one. It does not make sense to conceive the world as existing from independent objects.

As a consequence, when speaking about facts we usually studiously avoid the fact of risk. Participants in the “fact game” implicitly agree on the abandonment of negotiating affairs of risk. Despite the fact that empiric knowledge never can be considered as being “safe” or “secured”, during the fact game we always behave as if. Doing so is the more or less hidden work of language, which removes the risk (associated with predictive modeling) and replaces it by metaphorical expressibility. Interestingly, here we also meet the source field of logic. It is obvious (see Waves & Words) that language is neither an extension of logics, nor is it reasonable to consider it as a vehicle for logic, i.e. for predicates. Quite to the contrast, the underlying hypothesis is that (practicing) language and (weaving) metaphors is the same thing.11 Such a language becomes a living language that (as Gier writes [5])

“[…] grows up as a natural extension of primitive behavior, and we can count on it most of the time, not for the univocal meanings that philosophers demand, but for ordinary certainty and communication.”

One might just modify Gier’s statement a bit by specifying „philosophers“ as idealistic, materialistic or analytic philosophers.

In “On Certainty” (OC, §359), Wittgenstein speaks of language as expressing primitive behavior and contends that ordinary certainty is “something animal”. This now we may take as a bridge that provides the possibility to extend our asking about concepts and facts towards the investigation of the role of models.

Related to this there is a pragmatist aspect that is worthwhile to be mentioned. Experience is a historicizing concept, much like knowledge. Both concepts are meaningful only in hindsight. As soon as we consider their application, we see that both of them refer only to one half of the story that is about the epistemic aspects of „life“. The other half of the epistemic story and directly implied by the inevitable need to anticipate is predictive or, equivalently, diagnostic modeling. Abstract modeling in turn implies theory, interpretation and orthoregulated rule-following.

Epistemology thus should not be limited to „knowledge“, the knowable and its conditions. Epistemology has explicitly to include the investigation of the conditions of what can be anticipated.

In a still different way we thus may repose the question about experience as the transition from epistemic abstract modeling to the conditions of that modeling. This would include the instantiation of practicable models as well as the conditions for that instantiation, and also the conditions of the application of models.In technical terms this transition is represented by a problematic field: The model selection problem, or in more pragmatic terms, the model (selection) risk.

These two issues, the prediction task and the condition of modeling now form the second toehold of our bridge between the general concept of experience and some technical aspects of the use of models. There is another bridge necessary to establish the possibility of experience, and this one connects the concept of experience with languagability.

The following list provides an overview about the following chapters:

These topics are closely related to each other, indeed so closely that other sequences would be justifiable too. Their interdependencies also demand a bit of patience from you, the reader, as the picture will be complete only when we arrive at the results of modeling.

A last remark may be allowed before we start to delve into these topics. It should be clear by now that any kind of phenomenology is deeply incompatible with the view developed here. There are several related stances, e.g. the various shades of ontology, including the objectivist conception of substance. They are all rendered as irrelevant and inappropriate for any theory about episteme, whether in its machine-based form or regarding human culture, whether as practice or as reflecting exercise.

The Modeling Statement

As the very first step we have to clearly state the goal of modeling. From the outside that goal is pretty clear. Given a set of observations and the respective outcomes, or targets, create a mapping function such that the observed data allow for a reconstruction of the outcome in an optimized manner. Finding such a function can be considered as a simple form of learning if the function is „invented“. In most cases it is not learning but just the estimation of pre-defined parameters.12 In a more general manner we also could say that any learning algorithm is a map L from data sets to a ranked list of hypothesis functions. Note that accuracy is only one of the possible aspects of that optimization. Let us call this for convenience the „outer goal“ of modeling. Would such mapping be perfect within reasonable boundaries, we would have found automatically a possible transition from probabilistic presentation to propositional representation. We could consider the induction of a structural description from observations as completed. So far the secret dream of Hans Reichenbach, Carl Schmid-Hempel, Wesley Salmon and many of their colleagues.

The said mapping function will never be perfect. The reasons for this comprise the complexity of the subject, noise in the measured data, unsuitable observables or any combinations of these. This induces a wealth of necessary steps and, of course, a lot of work. In other words, a considerable amount of apriori and heuristic choices have to be taken. Since a reliable, say analytic mapping can’t be found, every single step in the value chain towards the model at once becomes questionable and has to be checked for its suitability and reliability. It is also clear that the model does not comprise just a formula. In real-world situations a differential modeling should be performed, much like in medicine a diagnosis is considered to be complete only if a differential diagnosis is included. This comprises the investigation of the influence of the method’s parameterization onto the results. Let us call the whole bunch of respective goals the „inner goals“ of modeling.

So, being faced with the challenge of such empirical mess, how does the statement about the goals of the „inner modeling“ look like? We could for instance demand to remove the effects of the shortfalls mentioned above, which cause the imperfect mapping: complexity of the subject, noise in the measured data, or unsuitable observables.

To make this more concrete we could say, that the inner goals of modeling consist in a two-fold (and thus synchronous!) segmentation of the data, resulting in the selection of the proper variables and in the selection of the proper records, where this segmentation is performed under conditions of a preceding non-linear transformation of the embedding reference system. Ideally, the model identifies the data for which it is applicable. Only for those data then a classification is provided. It is pretty clear that this statement is an ambitious one. Yet, we regard it as crucial for any attempt to step across our epistemic bridge that brings us from particular data to the quality of experience. This transition includes something that is probably better known by the label „induction“. Thus, we finally arrive at a short statement about the inner goals of modeling:

How to conclude and what to conclude from measured data?

Obviously, if our data are noisy and if our data include irrelevant values any further conclusion will be unreliable. Yet, for any suitable segmentation of the data we need a model first. From this directly follows that a suitable procedure for modeling can’t consist just from a single algorithm, or a „one-shot procedure“. Any instance of single-step approaches are suffering from lots of hidden assumptions that influence the results and its properties in unforeseeable ways. Modeling that could be regarded as more than just an estimation of parameters by running an algorithm is necessarily a circular and—dependent on the amount of variables—possibly open-ended process.

Predictability and Predictivity

Let us assume a set of observations S obtained from an empirical process P. Then this process P should be called “predictable” if the results of the mapping function f(m) that serves as an instance of a hypothesis h from the space of hypotheses H coincides with the outcome of the process P in such a way that f(m) forms an expectation with a deviation d<ε for all f(m). In this case we may say that f(m) predicts P. This deviation is also called “empirical risk”, and the purpose of modeling is often regarded as minimizing the empirical risk (ERM).

There are then two important questions. Firstly, can we trust f(m), since f(m) has been built on a limited number of observations? Secondly, how can we make f(m) more trustworthy, given the limitation regarding the data? Usually, these questions are handled under the label of validation. Yet, validation procedures are not the only possible means to get an answer here. It would be a misunderstanding to think that it is the building or construction of a model that is problematic.

The first question can be answered only by considering different models. For obtaining a set of different models we could apply different methods. That would be o.k. if prediction would be our sole interest. Yet, we also strive for detecting structural insights. And from that perspective we should not, of course, use different methods to get different models. The second possibility for addressing the first question is to use different sub-samples, which turns simple validation into a cross-validation. Cross-validation provides an expectation for the error (or the risk). Yet, in order to compare across methods one actually should describe the expected decrease in “predictive power”13 for different sample sizes (independent cross-validation per sample size). The third possibility for answering question (1) is related to the the former and consists by adding noised, surrogated (or simulated) data. This prevents the learning mechanism from responding to empirically consistent, but nevertheless irrelevant noisy fluctuations in the raw data set. The fourth possibility is to look for models of equivalent predictive power, which are, however, based on a different set of predicting variables. This possibility is not accessible for most statistical approaches such like Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Whatever method is used to create different models, models may be combined into a “bag” of models (called “bagging”), or, following an even more radical approach, into an ensemble of small and simple models. This is employed for instance in the so-called Random Forest method.

Commonly, if a model passes cross-validation successfully, it is considered to be able to “generalize”. In contrast to the common practice, Poggio et al. [7] demonstrated that standard cross-validation has to be extended in order to provide a characterization of the capability of a model to generalize. They propose to augment

CV1oo stability with stability of the expected error and stability of the empirical error to define a new notion of stability, CVEEE1oo stability.

This makes clear that Poggio’s et al. approach is addressing the learning machinery, not any longer just the space of hypotheses. Yet, they do not take the free parameters of the method into account. We conclude that their proposed approach still remains an uncritical approach. Thus I would consider such a model as not completely trustworthy. Of course, Poggio et al. are definitely pointing towards the right direction. We recognize a move away from naive realism and positivism, instead towards a critical methodology of the conditional. Maybe, philosophy and natural sciences find common grounds again by riding the information tiger.

Checking the stability of the learning procedure leads to a methodology that we called “data experiments” elsewhere. The data experiments do NOT explore the space of hypotheses, at least not directly. Instead they create a map for all possible models. In other words, instead of just asking about the predictability we now ask about the differential predictivity of in the space of models.

From the perspective of a learning theory Poggio’s move can’t be underestimated. Statistical learning theory (SLT)[8] explicitly assumes that a direct access to the world is possible (via identity function, perfectness of the model). Consequently, SLT focuses (only) on the reduction of the empirical risk. Any learning mechanism following the SLT is hence uncritical about its own limitation. SLT is interested in the predictability of the system-as-such, thereby not rather surprisingly committing the mistake of pre-19th century idealism.

The Independence Assumption

The independence assumption [I.A.], or linearity assumption, acts mainly on three different targets. The first of them is the relationship between observer and observed, while its second target is the relationship between observables. The third target finally regards the relation between individual observations. This last aspect of the I.A. is the least problematic one. We will not discuss this any further.

Yet, the first and the second one are the problematic ones. The I.A. is deeply buried into the framework of statistics and from there it made its way into the field of explorative data analysis. There it can be frequently met for instance in the geometrical operationalization of similarity, the conceptualization of observables as Cartesian dimensions or independent coefficients in systems of linear equations, or as statistical kernels in algorithms like the Support Vector Machine.

Of course, the I.A. is just one possible stance towards the treatment of observables. Yet, taking it as an assumption we will not include any parameter into the model that reflects the dependency between observables. Hence, we will never detect the most suitable hypothesis about the dependency between observables. Instead of assuming the independence of variables throughout an analysis it would be methodological much more sound to address the degree of dependency as a target. Linearity should not be an assumption, it should be a result of an analysis.

The linearity or independence assumption carries another assumption with it under its hood: the assumption of the homogeneity of variables. Variables, or assignates, are conceived as black-boxes, with unknown influence onto the predictive power of the model. Yet, usually they exert very different effects on the predictive power of a model.

Basically, it is very simple. The predictive power of a model depends on the positive predictive value AND the negative predictive value, of course; we may also use closely related terms sensitivity and specificity. Accordingly, some variables contribute more to the positive predictive value, other help to increase the negative predictive value. This easily becomes visible if we perform a detailed type-I/II error analysis. Thus, there is NO way to avoid testing those combinations explicitly, even if we assume the initial independence of variables.

As we already mentioned above, the I.A. is just one possible stance towards the treatment of observables. Yet, its status as a methodological sine qua non that additionally is never reflected upon renders it into a metaphysical assumption. It is in fact an irrational assumption, which induces serious costs in terms of the structural richness of the results. Taken together, the independence assumption represents one of the most harmful habits in data analysis.

The Model Selection Problem

In the section “Predictability and Predictivity” above we already emphasized the importance of the switch from the space of hypotheses to the space of models. The model space unfolds as a condition of the available assignates, the size of the data set and the free parameters of the associative (“modeling”) method. The model space supports a fundamental change of the attitude towards a model. Based on the denial of the apriori assumption of independence of observables we identified the idea of a singular best model as an ill-posed phantasm. We thus move onwards from the concept of a model as a mapping function towards ensembles of structurally heterogeneous models that together as a distinguished population form a habitat, a manifold in the sphere of the model space. With such a structure we neither need to arrive at a single model.

Methods, Models, Variables

The model selection problem addresses two sets of parameters that are actually quite different from each other. Model selection should not be reduced to the treatment of the first set, of course, as it happens at least implicitly for instance in [9]. The first set refers to the variables as known from the data, sometimes also called the „predictors“. The selection of the suitable variables is the first half of the model selection problem. The second set comprises all free parameters of the method. From the methodological point of view, this second set is much more interesting than the first one. The method’s parameters are apriori conditions to the performance of the method, which additionally usually remain invisible in the results, in contrast to the selection of variables.

For associative methods like SOM or other clustering variables the effect of de-/selecting variables can be easily described. Just take all the objects in front of you, for instance on the table, or in your room. Now select an arbitrary purpose and assign this purpose as a degree of support to those objects. For now, we have constructed the target. Now we go “into” the objects, that is, we describe them by a range of attributes that are present in most of the objects. Dependent on the selection of  a subset from these attributes we will arrive at very different groups. The groups now represent the target more or less, that’s the quality of the model. Obviously, this quality differs across the various selections of attributes. It is also clear that it does not help to just use all attributes, because some of the attributes just destroy the intended order, they add noise to the model and decrease its quality.

As George observes [10], since its first formulation in the 1960ies a considerable, if not large number of proposals for dealing with the variable selection problem have been proposed. Although George himself seem to distinguish the two sets of parameters, throughout the discussion of the different approaches he always refers just to the first set, the variables as included in the data. This is not a failure of the said author, but a problem of the statistical approach. Usually, the parameters of statistical procedures are not accessible, as any analytic procedure, they work as they work. In contrast to Self-organizing Maps, and even to Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) or Genetic Procedures, analytic procedures can’t be modified in order to achieve a critical usage. In some way, with their mono-bloc design they perfectly fit into representationalist fallacy.

Thus, using statistical (or other analytic) procedures, the model selection problem consists of the variable selection problem and the method selection problem. The consequences are catastrophic: If statistical methods are used in the context of modeling, the whole statistical framework turns into a black-box, because the selection of a particular method can’t be justified in any respect. In contrast to that quite unfavorable situation, methods like the Self-Organizing Map provide access to any of its parameters. Data experiments are only possible with methods like SOM or ANN. Not the SOM or the ANN are „black-boxes“, but the statistical framework must be regarded as such. Precisely this is also the reason for the still ongoing quarrels about the foundations of the statistical framework. There are two parties, the frequentists and the bayesians. Yet, both are struck by the reference class problem [11]. From our perspective, the current dogma of empirical work in science need to be changed.

The conclusion is that statistical methods should not be used at all to describe real-world data, i.e. for the modeling of real-world processes. They are suitable only within a fully controlled setting, that is, within a data experiment. The first step in any kind of empirical analysis thus must consist of a predictive modeling that includes the model selection task.14

The Perils of Universalism

Many people dealing with the model selection task are mislead by a further irrational phantasm, caused by a mixture of idealism and positivism. This is the phantasm of the single best model for a given purpose.

Philosophers of science long ago recognized, starting with Hume and ultimately expressed by Quine, that empirical observations are underdetermined. The actual challenge posed by modeling is given by the fact of empirical underdetermination. Goodman felt obliged to construct a paradox from it. Yet, there is no paradox, there is only the phantasm  of the single best model. This phantasm is a relic from the Newtonian period of science, where everybody thought the world is made by God as a miraculous machine, everything had to be well-defined, and persisting contradictions had to be rated as evil.

Secondarily, this moults into the affair of (semantic) indetermination. Plainly spoken, there are never enough data. Empirical underdetermination results in the actuality of strongly diverging models, which in turn gives rise to conflicting experiences. For a given set of data, in most cases it is possible to build very different models (ceteris paribus, choosing different sets of variables) that yield the same utility, or say predictive power, as far as this predictive power can be determined by the available data sample at all. Such ceteris paribus difference will not only give rise to quite different tracks of unfolding interpretation, it is also certainly in the close vicinity of Derrida’s deconstruction.

Empirical underdetermination thus results in a second-order risk, the model selection risk. Actually, the model selection risk is the only relevant risk. We can’t change the available data, and data are always limited, sometimes just by their puniness, sometimes by the restrictions to deal with them. Risk is not attached to objects or phenomena, because objects “are not there” before interpretation and modeling. Risk is attached only to models. Risk is a particular state of affair, and indeed a rather fundamental one. Once a particular model would tell us that there is an uncertainty regarding the outcome, we could take measures to deal with that uncertainty. For instance, we hedge it, or organize some other kind of insurance for it. But hedging has to rely on the estimation of the uncertainty, which is dependent on the expected predictive power of the model, not just the accuracy of the model given the available data from a limited sample.

Different, but equivalent selections of variables can be used to create a group of models as „experts“ on a given task to decide on. Yet, the selection of such „experts“ is not determinable on the basis of the given data alone. Instead, further knowledge about the relation of the variables to further contexts or targets needs to be consulted.

Universalism is usually unjustifiable, and claiming it instead usually comes at huge costs, caused by undetectable blindnesses once we accept it. In contemporary empiricism, universalism—and the respecting blindness—is abundant also with regard to the role of the variables. What I am talking about here is context, mediality and individuality, which, from a more traditional formal perspective, is often approximated by conditionality. Yet, it more and more becomes clear that the Bayesian mechanisms are not sufficient to get the complexity of the concept of variables covered. Just to mention the current developments in the field of probability theory I would like to refer to Brian  Weatherson, who favors and develops the so-called dynamic Keynesian models of uncertainty. [10] Yet, we regard this only as a transitional theory, despite the fact that it will have a strong impact on the way scientists will handle empiric data.

The mediating individuality of observables (as deliberately chosen assignates, of course) is easy to observe, once we drop the universalism qua independence of variables. Concerning variables, universalism manifests in an indistinguishability of the choices made to establish the assignates with regard to their effect onto the system of preferences. Some criteria C will induce the putative objects as distinguished ones only, if another assignate A has pre-sorted it. Yet, it would be a simplification to consider the situation in the Bayesian way as P(C|A). The problem with it is that we can’t say anything about the condition itself. Yet, we need to “play” (actually not “control”) with the conditionability, the inner structure of these conditions. As it is with the “relation,” which we already generalized into randolations, making it thereby measurable, we also have to go into the condition itself in order to defeat idealism even on the structural level. An appropriate perspective onto variables would hence treat it as a kind of media. This mediality is not externalizable, though, since observables themselves precipitate from the mediality, then as assignates.

What we can experience here is nothing else than the first advents of a real post-modernist world, an era where we emancipate from the compulsive apriori of independence (this does not deny, of course, its important role in the modernist era since Descartes).

Optimizing a model means to select a combination of suitably valued parameters such that the preferences of the users in terms of risk and implied costs are served best. The model selection problem is thus the link between optimization problems, learning tasks and predictive modeling. There are indeed countless many procedures for optimization. Yet, the optimization task in the context of model selection is faced with a particular challenge: its mere size. George begins his article in the following way:

A distinguishing feature of variable selection problems is their enormous size. Even with moderate values of p, computing characteristics for all 2p models is prohibitively expensive and some reduction of the model space is needed.

Assume for instance a data set that comprises 50 variables. From that 1.13e15 models are possible, and assume further that we could test 10‘000 models per second, then we still would need more than 35‘000 years to check all models. Usually, however, building a classifier on a real-world problem takes more than 10 seconds, which would result in 3.5e9 years in the case of 50 variables. And there are many instances where one is faced with much more variables, typically 100+, and sometimes going even into the thousands. That’s what George means by „prohibitively“.

There are many proposals to deal with that challenge. All of them fall into three classes: they use either (1) some information theoretic measure (AIC, BIC, CIC etc. [11]), or (2) they use likelihood estimators, i.e. they conceive of parameters themselves as random variables, or (3) they are based of probabilistic measures established upon validation procedures. Particularly the instances from the first two of those classes are hit by the linearity and/or the independence assumption, and also by unjustified universalism. Of course, linearity should not be an assumption, it should be a result, as we argued above. Hence, there is no way to avoid the explicit calculation of models.

Given the vast number of combinations of symbols it appears straightforward to conceive of the model selection problem from an evolutionary perspective. Evolution always creates appropriate and suitable solutions from the available „evolutionary model space“. That space is of size 230‘000 in the case of humans, which is a „much“ larger number than the number of species ever existent on this planet. Not a single viable configuration could have been found by pure chance. Genetics-based alignment and navigation through the model space is much more effective than chance. Hence, the so-called genetic algorithms might appear on the radar as the method of choice .

Genetics, revisited

Unfortunately, for the variable selection problem genetic algorithms15 are not suitable. The main reason for this is still the expensive calculation of single models. In order to set up the genetic procedure, one needs at least 500 instances to form the initial population. Any solution for the variable selection problem should arrive at a useful solution with less than 200 explicitly calculated models. The great advantage of genetic algorithms is their capability to deal with solution spaces that contain local extrema. They can handle even solution spaces that are inhomogeneously rugged, simply for the reason that recombination in the realm of the symbolic does not care about numerical gradients and criteria. Genetic procedures are based on combinations of symbolic encodings. The continuous switch between the symbolic (encoding) and the numerical (effect) are nothing else than the pre-cursors of the separation between genotypes and phenotypes, without which there would not be even simple forms of biological life.

For that reason we developed a specialized instantiation of the evolutionary approach (implemented in SomFluid). Described very briefly we can say that we use evolutionary weights as efficient estimators of the maximum likelihood of parameters. The estimates are derived from explicitly calculated models that vary (mostly, but not necessarily ceteris paribus) with respect to the used variables. As such estimates, they influence the further course of the exploration of the model space in a probabilistic manner. From the perspective of the evolutionary process, these estimates represent the contribution of the respective parameter to the overall fitness of the model. They also form a kind of long-term memory within the process, something like a probabilistic genome. The short-term memory in this evolutionary process is represented by the intensional profiles of the nodes in the SOM.

For the first initializing step, the evolutionary estimates can be estimated themselves by linear procedure like the PCA, or by non-parametric procedures (Kruskal-Wallis, Mann-Whitney, etc.), and are available after only a few explicitly calculated models (model here means „ceteris paribus selection of variables“).

These evolutionary weights reflect the changes of the predictive power of the model when adding or removing variables to the model. If the quality of the model improves, the evolutionary weight increases a bit, and vice versa. In other words, not the apriori parameters of the model are considered, but just the effect of the parameters. The procedure is an approximating repetition: fix the parameters of the model (method specific, sampling, variables), calculate the model, record the change of the predictive power as compared to the previous model.

Upon the probabilistic genome of evolutionary weights there are many different ways one could take to implement the “evo-devo” mechanisms, let it be the issue of how to handle the population (e.g. mixing genomes, aspects of virtual ecology, etc.), or the translational mechanisms, so to speak the “physiologies” that are used to proceed from the genome to an actual phenotype.

Since many different combinations are being calculated, the evolutionary weight represents the expectable contribution of a variable to the predictive power of the model, under whatsoever selection of variables that represents a model. Usually, a variable will not improve the quality of the model irrespective to the context. Yet, if a variable indeed would do so, we not only would say that its evolutionary weight equals 1, we also may conclude that this variable is a so-called confounder. Including a confounder into a model means that we use information about the target, which will not be available when applying the model for classification of new data; hence the model will fail disastrously. Usually, and that’s just a further benefit of dropping the independence-universalism assumption, it is not possible for a procedure to identify confounders by itself. It is also clear that the capability to do so is one of the cornerstones of autonomous learning, which includes the capability to set up the learning task.

Noise, and Noise

Optimization raises its own follow-up problems, of course. The most salient of these is so-called overfitting. This means that the model gets suitably fitted to the available observations by including a large number of parameters and variables, but it will return wrong predictions if it is going to be used on data that are even only slightly different from the observations used for learning and estimating the parameters of the model. The model represents noise, random variations without predictive value.

As we have been describing above, Poggio believes that his criterion of stability overcomes the defects with regard to the model as a generalization from observations. Poggio might be too optimistic, though, since his method still remains to be confined to the available observations.

In this situation, we apply a methodological trick. The trick consists in turning the problem into a target of investigation, which ultimately translates the problem into an appropriate rule. In this sense, we consider noise not as a problem, but as a tool.

Technically, we destroy the relevance of the differences between the observations by adding noise of a particular characteristic. If we add a small amount of normally distributed noise, nothing will probably change, but if we add a lot of noise, perhaps even of secondarily changing distribution, this will result in the mere impossibility to create a stable model at all. The scientific approach is to describe the dependency between those two unknowns, so to say, to set up a differential between noise (model for the unknown) and the model (of the unknown). The rest is straightforward: creating various data sets that have been changed by imposing different amounts of noise of a known structure, and plotting the predictive power against the the amount of noise. This technique can be combined by surrogating the actual observations via a Cholesky decomposition.

From all available models then those are preferred that combine a suitable predictive power with suitable degree of stability against noise.

In this section we have dealt with the problematics of selecting a suitable subset from all available observables (neglecting for the time being that model selection involves the method’s parameters, too). Since mostly we have more observables at our disposal than we actually presume to need, the task could be simply described as simplification, aka Occam’s Razor. Yet, it would be terribly naive to first assume linearity and then selecting the “most parsimonious” model. It is even cruel to state [9, p.1]:

It is said that Einstein once said

Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.

I hope that I succeeded in providing some valuable hints for accomplishing that task, which above all is not a quite simple one. (etc.etc. :)

Describing Classifiers

The gold standard for describing classifiers is believed to be the Receiver-Operator-Characteristic, or short, ROC. Particularly, the area under the curve is compared across models (classifiers). The following Figure 1demonstrates the mechanics of the ROC plot.

Figure 1: Basic characteristics of the ROC curve (reproduced from Wikipedia)

Figure 2. Realistic ROC curves, though these are typical for approaches that are NOT based on sub-group structures or ensembles (for instance ANN or logistic regression). Note that models should not be selected on the basis of the Area-under-Curve. Instead the true positive rate (sensitivity) at a false positive rate FPR=0 should be used for that. As a further criterion that would indicate the stability of of the model one could use the slope of the curve at FPR=0.

Utilization of Information

There is still another harmful aspect of the universalistic stance in data analysis as compared to a pragmatic stance. This aspect considers the „reach“ of the models we are going to build.

Let us assume that we would accept a sensitivity of approx 80%, but we also expect a specificity of >99%. In other words, the cost for false positives (FP) are defined as very high, while the costs for false negatives (FN, not recognized preferred outcomes) are relatively low. The ratio of costs for error, or in short the error cost ratio err(FP)/err(FN) is high.

Table 1a: A Confusion matrix for a quite performant classifier.

Symbols: test=model; TP=true positives; FP=false positives; FN=false negatives; TN=true negatives; ppv=positive predictive value, npv=negative predictive value. FN is also called type-I-error (analogous to “rejecting the null hypothesis when it is true”), while FP is called type-II-error (analogous to “accepting the null hypothesis when it is false”), and FP/(TP+FP) is called type-II-error-rate, sometime labeled as β-error, where (1-β) is the called the “power” of the test or model. (download XLS example)

condition Pos

condition Neg

test Pos

100 (TP)

3 (FP)

test Neg

28 (FN)

1120 (TN)

Let us further assume that there are observations of our preferred outcome that we can‘t distinguish well from other cases of the opposite outcome that we try to avoid. They are too similar, and due to that similarity they form a separate group in our self-organizing map. Let us assume that the specificity of these clusters is at 86% only and the sensitivity is at 94%.

Table 1b: Confusion matrix describing a sub-group formed inside the SOM, for instance as it could be derived from the extension of a “node”.

condition Pos

condition Neg

test Pos

0 (50)

0 (39)

0.0 (0.56)

test Neg

50 (0)

39 (0)

0.44 (1.0)

0.0 (1.0)

1.0 (0.0)

Yet, this cluster would not satisfy our risk attitude. If we would use the SOM as a model for classification of new observations, and the new observation would fall into that group (by means of similarity considerations) the implied risk would violate our attitude. Hence, we have to exclude such clusters. In the ROC this cluster represents a value further to the right on the specificity (X-) axis.

Note that in the case of acceptance of the subgroup as a representative for a contributor of a positive prediction, the false negative is always 0 aposteriori, and in case of denial the true positives is always set to 0 (accordingly the figures for the condition negative).

There are now several important points to that, which are related to each other. Actually, we should be interested only in such sub-groups with specificity close to 1, such that our risk attitude is well served. [13] Likewise, we should not try to optimize the quality of the model across the whole range of the ROC, but only for the subgroups with acceptable error cost ratio. In other words, we use the available information in a very specific manner.

As a consequence, we have to set the ECR before calculating the model. Setting the ECR after the selection of a model results in a waste of information, time and money. For this reason it is strongly indicated to use methods that are based on building a representation by sub-groups. This again rules out statistical methods as they always take into account all available data. Zytkow calls such methods empirically empty [14].

The possibility to build models of a high specificity is a huge benefit of sub-group based methods like the SOM.16 To understand this better let us assume we have a SOM-based model with the following overall confusion matrix.

condition Pos

condition Neg

test Pos

test Neg

That is, the model recognizes around 35% of all preferred outcomes. It does so on the basis of sub-groups that all satisfy the respective ECR criterion. Thus we know that the implied risk of any classification is very low too. In other words, such models recognize whether it is allowed to apply them. If we apply them and get a positive answer, we also know that it is justified to apply them. Once the model identifies a preferred outcome, it does so without risk. This lets us miss opportunities, but we won’t be trapped by false expectations. Such models we could call auto-consistent.

In a practical project that has been aiming at an improvement of the post-surgery risk classification of patients (n>12’000) in a hospital we have been able to demonstrate that the achievable validated rate of implied risk can be as low as <10e-4. [15] Such a low rate is not achievable by statistical methods, simply because there are far too few incidents of wrong classifications. The subjective cut-off points in logistic regression are not quite suitable for such tasks.

At the same time, and that’s probably even more important, we get a suitable segmentation of the observations. All observations that can be identified as positive do not suffer from any risk. Thus, we can investigate the structure of the data for these observations, e.g. as particular relationships between variables, such as correlations etc. But, hey, that job is already done by the selection of the appropriate set of variables! In other words, we not only have a good model, we also have found the best possibility for a multi-variate reduction of noise, with a full consideration of the dependencies between variables. Such models can be conceived as reversed factorial experimental design.

The property of auto-consistency offers a further benefit as it is scalable, that is, “auto-consistent” is not a categorical, or symbolic, assignment. It can be easily measured as sensitivity under the condition of specificity > 1-ε, ε→0. Thus, we may use it as a random measure (it can be described by its density) or as a scale of reference in case of any selection task among sub-populations of models. Additionally, if the exploration of the model space does not succeed in finding a model of a suitable degree of auto-consistency, we may conclude that the quality of the data is not sufficient. Data quality is a function of properly selected variables (predictors) and reproducible measurement. We know of no other approach that would be able to inform about the quality of the data without referring to extensive contextual “knowledge”. Needless to say that such knowledge is never available and encodable.

There are only weak conditions that need to be satisfied. For instance, the same selection of variables need to be used within a single model for all similarity considerations. This rules out all ensemble methods, as far as different selections of variables are used for each item in the ensemble; for instance decision tree methods (a SOM with its sub-groups is already “ensemble-like”, yet, all sub-groups are affected by the same selection of variables). It is further required to use a method that performs the transition from extensions to intensions on a sub-group level,which rules out analytic methods, and even Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). The way to establish auto-consistent models is not possible for ANN. Else, the error-cost ratio must be set before calculating the model, and the models have to be calculated explicitly, which removes linear methods from the list, such as Support Vector Machines with linear kernels (regression, ANN, Bayes). If we want to access the rich harvest of auto-consistent models we have to drop the independence hypothesis and we have to refute any kind of universalism. But these costs are rather low, indeed.

Observations and Probabilities

Here we developed a particular perspective onto the transition from observations to intensional representations. There are of course some interesting relationships of our point of view to the various possibilities of “interpreting” probability (see [16] for a comprehensive list of “interpretations” and interesting references). We also provide a new answer to Hume’s problem of induction.

Hume posed the question, how often should we observe a fact until we could consider it as lawful? This question, called the “problem of induction” points to the wrong direction and will trigger only irrelevant answer. Hume, living still in times of absolute monarchism, in a society deeply structured by religious beliefs, established a short-cut between the frequency of an observation and its propositional representation. The actual question, however, is how to achieve what we call an “observation”.

In very simple, almost artificial cases like the die there is nothing to interpret. The die and its values are already symbols. It is in some way inadequate to conceive of a die or of dicing as an empirical issue. In fact, we know before what could happen. The universe of the die consists of precisely 6 singular points.

Another extreme are so-called single-case observations of structurally rich events, or processes. An event, or a setting should be called structurally rich, if there are (1) many different outcomes, and (2) many possible assignates to describe the event or the process. Such events or processes will not produce any outcome that is could be expected by symbolic or formal considerations. Obviously, it is not possible to assign a relative frequency to a unique, a singular, or a non-repeatable event. Unfortunately, however, as Hájek points out [17], any actual sequence can be conceived of as a singular event.

The important point now is that single-case observations are also not sufficiently describable as an empirical issue. Ascribing propensities to objects-in-the-world demands for a wealth of modeling activities and classifications, which have to be completed apriori to the observation under scrutiny. So-called single-case propensities are not a problem of probabilistic theory, but one of the application of intensional classes and their usage as means for organizing one’s own expectations. As we said earlier, probability as it is used in probability theory is not a concept that could be applied meaningful to observations, where observations are conceived of as primitive “givens”. Probabilities are meaningful only in the closed world of available subjectively held concepts.

We thus have to distinguish between two areas of application for the concept of probability: the observational part, where we build up classes, and the anticipatory part, where we are interested in a match of expectations and actual outcomes. The problem obviously arises by mixing them through the notion of causality.17 Yet, there is absolutely no necessity between the two areas. The concept of risk probably allows for a resolution of the problems, since risk always implies a preceding choice of a cost function, which necessarily is subjective. Yet, the cost function and the risk implied by a classification model is also the angle point for any kind of negotiation, whether this takes place on an material, hence evolutionary scale, or within a societal context.

The interesting, if not salient point is that the subjectively available intensional descriptions and classes are dependent on ones risk attitude. We may observe the same thing only  if we have acquired the same system of related classes and the same habits of using them. Only if we apply extreme risk aversion we will achieve a common understanding about facts (in the Wittgensteinian sense, see above). This then is called science, for instance. Yet, it still remains a misunderstanding to equate this common understanding with objects as objects-out-there.

The problem of induction thus must be considered as a seriously  ill-posed problem. It is a problem only for idealists (who then solve it in a weird way), or realists that are naive against the epistemological conditions of acting in the world. Our proposal for the transition from observations to descriptions is based on probabilism on both sides, yet, on either side there is a distinct flavor of probabilism.

Finally, a methodological remark shall be allowed, closely related to what we already described in the section about “noise” above. The perspective onto “making experience” that we have been proposing here demonstrates a significant twist.

Above we already mentioned Alan Hájek’s diagnosis that the frequentist and the Bayesian interpretation of probabilities suffer from the reference class problem. In this section we extended Hájek’s concerns to the concept of propensity. Yet, if the problem shows a high prevalence we should not conceive it as a hurdle but should try to treat it dynamically as a rule.The reference class is only a problem as long as (1) either the actual class is required as an external constant, or (2) the abstract concept of the class is treated as a fixed point. According to the rule of Lagrange-Deleuze, any constant can be rewritten into a procedure (read: rules) and less problematic constants. Constants, or fixed points on a higher abstract level are less problematic, because the empirically grounded semantics vanishes.

Indeed, the problem of the reference class simply disappears if we put the concept of the class, together with all the related issues of modeling, as the embedding frame, the condition under which any notion of probability only can make sense at all. The classes itself are results of “rule-following”, which  admittedly is blind, but whose parameters are also transparently accessible. In this way, probabilistic interpretation is always performed in a universe, that is closed and in principle fully mapped. We need the probabilistic methods just because that universe is of a huge size. In other words, the space of models is a Laplacean Universe.

Since statistical methods and similar interpretations of probability are analytical techniques, our proposal for a re-positioning of statistics into such a Laplacean Universe is also well aligned with the general habit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which puts practiced logic (quasi-logic) second to performance.

The disappearance of the reference class problem should be expected if our relations to the world are always mediated through the activity with abstract, epistemic modeling. The usage of probability theory as a “conceptual game” aiming for sharing diverging attitudes towards risks appears as nothing else than just a particular style of modeling, though admittedly one that offers a reasonable rate of success.

The Result of Modeling

It should be clear by now, that the result of modeling is much more than just a single predictive model. Regardless whether we take the scientific perspective or a philosophical vantage point, we need to include operationalizations of the conditions of the model, that reach beyond the standard empirical risk expressed as “false classification”. Appropriate modeling provides not only a set of models with well-estimated stability and of different structures; a further goal is to establish models that are auto-consistent.

If the modeling employs a method that exposes its parameters, we even can avoid the „method hell“, that is, the results are not only reliable, they are also valid.

It is clear that only auto-consistent models are useful for drawing conclusions and in building up experience. If variables are just weighted without actually being removed, as for instance in approaches like the Support Vector Machines, the resulting methods are not auto-consistent. Hence, there is no way towards a propositional description of the observed process.

Given the population of explicitly tested models it is also possible to describe the differential contribution of any variable to the predictive power of a model. The assumption of neutrality or symmetry of that contribution, as it is for instance applied in statistical learning, is a simplistic perspective onto the variables and the system represented by them.

In this essay we described some technical aspects of the capability to experience. These technical aspects link the possibility for experience to the primacy of interpretation that gets actualized as the techné of anticipatory, i.e. predictive or diagnostic modeling. This techné does not address the creation or derivation of a particular model by means of employing one or several methods. The process of building a model could be fully automated anyway. Quite differently, it focuses the parametrization, validation, evaluation and application of models, particularly with respect to the task of extract a rule from observational data. This extraction of rules must not be conceived as a “drawing of conclusions” guided by logic. It is a constructive activity.

The salient topics in this practice are the selection of models and the description of the classifiers. We emphasized that the goal of modeling should not be conceived as the task of finding a single best model.

Methods like the Self-organizing Map which are based on sub-group segmentation of the data can be used to create auto-consistent models, which represent also an optimally de-noised subset of the measured data. This data sample could be conceived as if it would have been found by a factorial experimental design. Thus, auto-consistent models also provide quite valuable hints for the setup of the Taguchi method of quality assurance, which could be seen as a precipitation of organizational experience.

In the context of exploratory investigation of observational data one first has to determine the suitable observables (variables, predictors) and, by means of the same model(s), the suitable segment of observations before drawing domain-specific conclusions. Such conclusions are often expressed as contrasts in location or variation. In the context of designed experiments as e.g. in pharmaceutical research one first has to check the quality of the data, then to de-noise the data by removing outliers by means of the same data segmentation technique, before again null hypotheses about expected contrasts could be tested.

As such, auto-consistent models provide a perfect basis for learning and for extending the “experience” of an epistemic individual. According to our proposals this experience does not suffer from the various problems of traditional Humean empirism (the induction problem), or contemporary (defective) theories of probabilism (mainly the problem of reference classes). Nevertheless, our approach remains fully empirico-epistemological.

1. As many other philosophers Lyotard emphasized the indisputability of an attention for the incidential, not as a perception-as, but as an aisthesis, as a forming impression. see: Dieter Mersch, ›Geschieht es?‹ Ereignisdenken bei Derrida und Lyotard. available online, last accessed May 1st, 2012. Another recent source arguing into the same direction is John McDowell’s “Mind and World” (1996).

2. The label “representationalism” has been used by Dreyfus in his critique of symbolic AI, the thesis of the “computational mind” and any similar approach that assumes (1) that the meaning of symbols is given by their reference to objects, and (2) that this meaning is independent of actual thoughts, see also [2].

3. It would be inadequate to represent such a two-fold “almost” dichotomy as a 2-axis coordinate system, even if such a representation would be a metaphorical one only; rather, it should be conceived as a tetraedic space, given by two vectors passing nearby without intersecting each other. Additionally, the structure of that space must not expected to be flat, it looks much more like an inhomogeneous hyperbolic space.

4. “Experiencibility” here not understood as an individual capability to witness or receptivity, but as the abstract possibility to experience.

5. In the same way we reject Husserl’s phenomenology. Phenomena, much like the objects of positivism or the thing-as-such of idealism, are not “out there”, they are result of our experiencibility. Of course, we do not deny that there is a materiality that is independent from our epistemic acts, but that does not explain or describe anything. In other words we propose go subjective (see also [3]).

6. Again, mechanism here should not be misunderstood as a single deterministic process as it could be represented by a (trivial) machine.

7. This question refers to the famous passage in the Tractatus, that “The world is everything that is the case.“ Cases, in the terminology of the Tractatus, are facts as the existence of states of affairs. We may say, there are certain relations. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein excluded relations that could not be explicated by the use of symbols., expressed by the 7th proposition: „Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.“

8. We must step outside of language in order to see the working of language.

9. We just have to repeat it again, since many people develop misunderstandings here. We do not deny the material aspects of the world.

10. “individual” is quite misleading here, since our brain and even our mind is not in-divisable in the atomistic sense.

11. thus, it is also not reasonable to claim the existence of a somehow dualistic language, one part being without ambiguities and vagueness, the other one establishing ambiguity deliberately by means of metaphors. Lakoff & Johnson started from a similar idea, yet they developed it into a direction that is fundamentally incompatible with our views in many ways.

12. Of course, the borders are not well defined here.

13. “predictive power” could be operationalized in quite different ways, of course….

14. Correlational analysis is not a candidate to resolve this problem, since it can’t be used to segment the data or to identify groups in the data. Correlational analysis should be performed only subsequent to a segmentation of the data.

15. The so-called genetic algorithms are not algorithms in the narrow sense, since there is no well-defined stopping rule.

16. It is important to recognize that Artificial Neural Networks are NOT belonging to the family of sub-group based methods.

17. Here another circle closes: the concept of causality can’t be used in a meaningful way without considering its close amalgamation with the concept of information, as we argued here. For this reason, Judea Pearl’s approach towards causality [16] is seriously defective, because he completely neglects the epistemic issue of information.

  • [1] Geoffrey C. Bowker, Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. MIT Press, Boston 1999.
  • [2] Willian Croft, Esther J. Wood, Construal operations in linguistics and artificial intelligence. in: Liliana Albertazzi (ed.) , Meaning and Cognition. Benjamins Publ, Amsterdam 2000.
  • [3] Wilhelm Vossenkuhl. Solipsismus und Sprachkritik. Beiträge zu Wittgenstein. Parerga, Berlin 2009.
  • [5] Nicholas F. Gier, Wittgenstein and Deconstruction, Review of Contemporary Philosophy 6 (2007); first publ. in Nov 1989. Online available.
  • [6] Henk L. Mulder, B.F.B. van de Velde-Schlick (eds.), Moritz Schlick, Philosophical Papers, Volume II: (1925-1936), Series: Vienna Circle Collection, Vol. 11b, Springer, Berlin New York 1979. with Google Books
  • [7] Tomaso Poggio, Ryan Rifkin, Sayan Mukherjee & Partha Niyogi (2004). General conditions for predictivity in learning theory. Nature 428, 419-422.
  • [8]  Vladimir Vapnik, The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory (Information Science and Statistics). Springer 2000.
  • [9] Herman J. Bierens (2006). Information Criteria and Model Selection. Lecture notes, mimeo, Pennsylvania State University. available online.
  • [10 ]Brian Weatherson (2007). The Bayesian and the Dogmatist. Aristotelian Society Vol.107, Issue 1pt2, 169–185. draft available online
  • [11] Edward I. George (2000). The Variable Selection Problem. J Am Stat Assoc, Vol. 95 (452), pp. 1304-1308. available online, as research paper.
  • [12] Alan Hájek (2007). The Reference Class Problem is Your Problem Too. Synthese 156(3): 563-585. draft available online.
  • [13] Lori E. Dodd, Margaret S. Pepe (2003). Partial AUC Estimation and Regression. Biometrics 59( 3), 614–623.
  • [14] Zytkov J. (1997). Knowledge=concepts: a harmful equation. 3rd Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Proceedings of KDD-97, p.104-109.AAAI Press.
  • [15] Thomas Kaufmann, Klaus Wassermann, Guido Schüpfer (2007).  Beta error free risk identification based on SPELA, a neuro-evolution method. presented at ESA 2007.
  • [16] Alan Hájek, “Interpretations of Probability”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available online, or forthcoming.
  • [17] Judea Pearl, Causality – Models, Reasoning, and Inference. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge  (Mass.) 2008 [2000].

Waves, Words and Images

April 7, 2012 § 1 Comment

The big question of philosophy, and probably its sole question,

This Essay

From Matter to Mind

The Unresolved Challenge

And in the Philosophical Grammar:

Names, proper: Performing the turn completely

Representing Words

Words, Classes, Models, Waves

Role of Words

Understanding (Images, Words, …)

5. particularly homo erectus and  homo sapiens spec.

6. Humans of the species homo sapiens sapiens.

9. elementarization regarding Descartes

16 see Stanford Encyclopedia for a discussion of various positions.

18. See our essay about logic.

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