some fuzzy response

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

I'm way behind in this thread, but here is where I am so far.  Pardon me
if this is all old hat.

Steven Belknap:
>>OK, describe what I mean when I say that a restaurant was a 4.5 on a
>>restaurant-scale of 0 to 8.
>
>If you ever come to Chicago perhaps we can go to one of our many fine
>restarants to further discuss the relative value of various logical
>systems.  But which restaurant?  There is a magazine called Chicago
>Magazine which rates the restaurants here.  They use an 8 point scale
>expressed as stars and half stars.  A second scale evaluates cost.  In
>my twenty years of using this guide, I have been impressed with the
>utility of this guide.  Obviously, Korean food is much different than
>nouelle cuisine, and there are many other objective & subjective
>factors.  Several hundred thousand people use this guide every month; a
>favorable rating can fill a restaurant, and unfavorable rating can empty
>it.  So here we all are in Chicago using the system you claim is of no
>value.  We Chicagoans must be an awfully foolhardy lot.

The thing that gives this review "clout" is three-fold:

1) a history of many such reviews, such that people can say "yes,they
were right about those several restaurants, so they probably are right
about others.

2) Most reviews are not limited solely to numbers and stars, and the
people who make reviews take off are the movers and shakers who read the
text that justify the ratings.  If THOSE words match their own
experiences, then they have more trust as to WHY the numbers were
chosen.

3) Once a set of review reaches mass-level psychology, a mind set sets
in where people determine their standards of what is good BY the review
just as people largely determine that standard of a good movie by
Academy Awards and movie reviews.  Every once in a while something comes
along that defies the critics and becomes popular anyway, but this is
rare - most people are sheep.

>I asked this woman to rate the severity of her pain as we adjusted her
>pain medication.  Initially we used a drug-delivery system which
>provided a continuous, high concentration of narcotic.  Surprisingly,
>this was not very effective.  We had to push the dose to the point of
>toxicity.  Then we noticed something interesting.  Her 1 to 10 ratings
>of pain were markedly more episodic than is usually the case, spiking up
>into the 7 to 9 range, so we changed to a subcutaneous patient
>controlled analgesia system, in which she could squirt herself with
>narcotic when her pain was severe and forego the narcotic when it wasn't
>that bad.  But she also had baseline pain around 3. So we gave a very
>low dose constant infusion of narcotic also This worked very well.  The
>total daily dose of narcotic with this dosing regimen was 1/3 of the
>total daily dose of narcotic she was originally getting, she had better
>pain control, and less nausea and other adverse effects.

What made this work was a large number of data points from the one
observer under varying conditions, that allowed you to assign diagnostic
meaning to her scale, probably correlated by your medical observations
when she had spikes.  I live in constant low level pain of several
varieties that I mostly associate with stress.  But I could never rank
them on a 1 to 10 scale, because I have no idea what a 10 would be.  I
could rank them relative to each other on an open-ended scale, but that
would tell you relatively little without some correlation with responses
to medicine and other medical factors.  If I were to arbitrarily tell
you off the cuff that I am feeling pain at a 3 on a 1-10 scale, even >I<
wouldn't know what I meant by that.

>>Discrete logics do model human thinking quite well
>
>Do you have some evidence to support this assertion?  It is at variance
>with my own observations and with the scientific literature.

I think that people BELIEVE they have to categorize and cubbyhole in
order to be "objective".  Not being categorical has earned the label
"slippery slope" for good reason.

There is considerable evidence that strict categorization is innate (and
fuzziness is learned).  Young kids call any animal with 4 legs "doggy" -
not "sort of a doggy".  It is only as we approach adulthood, and learn
that not everyone agrees with us on everything we believe, that we start
to hedge our categorizations.

I suspect that Peter argues against you at least partially on such a
basis.  Questions of strength of feeling in opinion polls tend to be
even more susceptable to manipulation by careful wording than do
categorical yes/no opinion polls.

>On Wed, 22 Nov 1995, Steven M. Belknap wrote:
>> But Peter still fails to set an independent, nonsubjective criteria for
>> distinguishing hills from mountains or heaps from nonheaps. Peter seems to
>> be using the same approach Ed Meese used to define pornography, "I know it
>> when I see it." Surely language, even natlangs, can accomplish more than
>> that!

Yet in this very example, it hasn't.  There is no clear definition of
pornography; it is judged by appealing to unspecified prvailing
community standards.  Probably unconstitutional because community
standards are not going to be evaluable in any case except ex post facto
and this is tantamount under some analyses to being an ex post facto
law, forbidden under the constitution.

>If you say so.  But anyway, the problem is that the numbers aren't being
>used as numbers (in other words, a 3 restaurant isn't really 2 times
>worse than a 6 restaurant), they're just being used as symbols for words
>like "awful", "good", "bad", "wonderful" etc.  So why pretend that the
>evaluation is somehow mathematical, when it is only subjective?

This seems a key point.  In your pain example, and in the restaurant
review examples, the numbers given are not necessarily linearly
proportional.

lojbab