timelets

If a research experiment were well defined, it would be altogether unnecessary to perform it. For the experimental arrangements to be well defined, the outcome must be known in advance; otherwise the procedure cannot be limited and purposeful. The more unknowns there are and the newer a field of research is, the less well defined are the experiments.
...
And if after years we were to look back upon a field we have worked in, we could no longer see or understand the difficulties present in that creative work. The actual course of development becomes rationalized and schematized. We project the results into our intentions; but how could it be any different? We can no longer express the previously incomplete thoughts with these now finished concepts.

Cognition modifies the knower so as to adapt him harmoniously to his acquired knowledge.

-- Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of a scientific fact.

similar to Bezos' "wandering."

Что же здесь происходит? Почему нужно избушку повернуть? Почему нельзя войти просто? Часто перед Иваном гладкая стена
— «без окон без дверей» — вход с противоположной стороны. «У этой избушки ни окон, ни дверей, — ничего нет» (17). Но отчего же не обойти избушки и не войта с той стороны? Очевидно, этого нельзя. Очевидно, избушка стоит на какой-то такой види- мой или невидимой грани, через которую Иван никак не может перешагнуть. Попасть на эту грань можно только через, сквозь избушку, и избушку нужно повернуть, «чтобы мне зайти и выйти»

-- В. Пропп. Исторические корни волшебной сказки.

I never thought about избушка as an interface, an airlock, between spaces. We could probably model it as a pushout.

Another interesting observation:

Слеп человек не сам по себе, а по отношению к чeму-нибудь. Под «слепотой» может быть вскрыто понятие некоторой обоюдности невидимости.

...
Герой все это знает, потому что он г е р о й . Геройство его и состоит в его магическом знании, в его силе.
Вся эта система испытания отражает древнейшие представления о том, что подобно тому, как магически можно вызвать дождь или заставить зверя идти на ловца, можно вынудить вход в иной мир. Дело вовсе не в «добродетели» и «чистоте», а в силе.

What makes it the case that something counts as a form of cognitive success? For instance, why think that knowing the capital of Pakistan is a cognitive success, rather than just another cognitive state that an agent can occupy, like having 70% confidence that Islamabad is the capital of Pakistan? Not every cognitive state enjoys cognitive success. Knowing, understanding, mastering—these are cognitive successes.

[e.g]...we describe a person as “knowing” something as a way of signaling that her testimony with respect to that thing is to be trusted.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/

Machines can now be trained to generate information traditionally associated with cognitive successes by humans. Today, we know relatively well what kind of cognitive success is achievable for a majority humans. We are still in the beginning of the process of building cognitively successful computers. We simply don't know what they are capable of when trained by a small number of highly successful humans.

[92] (1) As for the first point, it is necessary (as we have said) for our purpose that everything should be conceived, either solely through its essence, or through its proximate cause.

(2) If the thing be self-existent, or, as is commonly said, the cause of itself, it must be understood through its essence only; if it be not self-existent, but requires a cause for its existence, it must be understood through its proximate cause.

(3) For, in reality, 
                   the knowledge
                   of an effect 
is nothing else than 
                  the acquisition of 
                  more perfect knowledge
of its cause.”

--- Benedictus de Spinoza. “Improvement of the Understanding.”


// is this the origin of the reasoning behind the "good laws" methods?

[30:2]
...we must first take care  not to commit ourselves to a search, going back to infinity - that is, 

in order to discover 
                     the best method 
of finding truth, there is
               no need of another method 
               to discover such method; 
nor of a third method 
for discovering the second, 
                and so on to infinity. 

(3) By such proceedings, we should never arrive at the knowledge of the truth, or, indeed, at any knowledge at all.

[31] (1) But as men at first made use of the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished, wrought other things more difficult with less labour and greater perfection; and so gradually mounted from the simplest operations to the making of tools, and from the making of tools to the making of more complex tools, and fresh feats of workmanship, till they arrived at making, complicated mechanisms which they now possess.



--- Benedictus de Spinoza. “Improvement of the Understanding.”

...the insight into the discontinuous series of points on the graph consists in a grasp, not of necessity or impossibility, but simply of possibility.

--- Bernard Lonergan. Insight, a study of human understanding.

This could be a link between a new technique for extracting data, i.e. creating a new graph/space, and discovering new possibilities, both in the old, but more importantly in the new space.

He [Wittgenstein] does not mean by this that the doubt in question is spurious or deceitful, only that it is not real doubt – it is not what we mean by doubt. We doubt when we have reason to doubt, not because we are at leisure to doubt: ‘The question is this: how is doubt introduced into the language-game? One doubts on specific grounds’ (OC 458). Moreover, the philosophical sceptic’s doubt purports to be obsessive or radical: from the fact that we sometimes have reason to doubt, he concludes that we are always entitled to doubt. It is, again, precisely in this that the sceptic’s doubt is not real doubt: ‘A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt’ (OC 450); ‘If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty’ (OC 115).
...
According to Wittgenstein, the sceptic is making two grave mistakes – and these are connected. One, we have just seen, is that he is mistaking the behaviour of doubt for genuine doubt; and the other is that he is mistaking hinges for propositions (either empirical or epistemic).

Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, Understanding Wittgenstein's On Certainty.

Reasoned vs at leisure doubt is a key distinction that emerges from OC.