eJournal: uffmm.org
ISSN 2567-6458, 19.August 2022 – 20 August 2022
Email: info@uffmm.org
Author: Gerd Doeben-Henisch
Email: gerd@doeben-henisch.de

CONTEXT

This text is part of the subject COMMON SCIENCE as Sustainable Applied Empirical Theory, besides ENGINEERING, in a SOCIETY. It is a preliminary version, which is intended to become part of a book.

FORECASTING

(Has to be re-written)

We know from everyday life and partially from science that this ability of abstract potentials as part of possible processes can under certain conditions be used for ‘forecasts’ with important practical consequences: for the Egyptian people it was of high importance to know in advance when the floods of the Nil river would arise again. Generally it was important to understand the different periods of the year, the process of time, or the connections between food and effects on our bodies, or the ‘art of agriculture’ to prepare for enough food for all people, and much more.

With the reality of being part of a process with a NOW, with the ability to overcome the NOW by generating abstractions, sequences of states, and recognizing changes, with the ability to derive ‘possible follow-up states’ out of the known sequences of states, it is generally possible to produce forecasts.

But not any forecast is ‘helpful’.

If the experts say that in two weeks the floods of the river will come, but this would not happen, it would not be appreciated; if people recommend certain food for your health and you will become ill, it would not be appreciated either. Thus forecasts should possess the property, that the state, which is ‘announced to become true’, indeed would become ‘true’. ‘True’ means here that the ‘announced state’ will at some ‘point in the future’ be ‘instantiated by some real facts which can be observed.

This leads to the interesting question, how it is possible to ‘derive’ from some ‘given states’ in the memory ‘possible states’ in the memory, which have the potential to become in some time ‘instantiated’ in a way, which makes them ‘real’ and thereby ‘observable’.

In modern formal logic language expressions are well defined expressions of some language but ‘without any concrete meaning’. The only assumed property of logical statements is the property to be called ‘true’ or ‘false’ without relating these abstract properties to some real meaning. Thus you can play with these ‘logical expressions’ in a purely formal way by defining some rules, how one can change an expression and under which conditions the transformation of a set of given expressions into another set of expressions is called a ‘logical derivation’ which preserves the ‘abstract trues’ of the assumed primary set of expressions. These are nice games allowing numerous different kinds of definitions of ‘logical derivation’ without any real relation to everyday language and meaning. All the known examples how to use formal logic applied to everyday meaning until today are not really convincing. The numerous articles and even books dealing with such examples can only work, if we forget nearly everything which we know about our everyday world. This seems to be a strange deal.

If one instead looks to the way human actors are making forecasts in the everyday world without using formal logic one can detect, that this is not only possible, it seems to be the only powerful way to do it.

— draft version —