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Analogy of constitution of body and language in René Thom
These images show the 2-fold eversion in an early "gastrula" stage, at a stage between the creation of the first and second double curves, and finally almost at the halfway stage.Images extracted from a video by John M. Sullivan, George Francis and Stuart Levy / Copyright 1998, University of IllinoisThe embryo of most of animals belongs to the triploblastic type, made from three fundamental “leafs”: ectoderm, mesoderm and endoderm. At the beginning of the life of the embryo, after 5-7 days, blastula is constituted by endoderm on its inner surface, ectoderm on its outer surface and mesoderm in between. By successive invaginations of the blastula, the three derms will shape the body. The ectoderm will become the skin (not all of it), sensorial organs, and the nervous system; the mesoderm will produce the bones muscles, blood, heart, vascular system, excretion organs and a part of the skin; the endoderm, intestinal mucous and varied digestive glands like the liver. This construction of the body (at the opposite of the insects, shut up in their shells made of endoderm) gives a predisposition for the sensibility to the exterior. René Thom is even talking of alienation to the outer world: “Intelligence is the ability to identify to something else, to others. The human nervous system is an organ of alienation. It allows to be something else than oneself.*”According to R. Thom, this ternary constitution of the body has to be linked to the ternary constitution of the language itself: the endoderm becoming the subject (S), the mesoderm the verb (V), and the ectoderm the object (O).“SVO like in the sentence: “The cat eats the mouse”. Like the mesoderm built the bones and the muscles, its identification with the grammatical category of the verb is plain. On the other hand, a certain ambiguity remains about the correspondence between subject-object and ectoderm-endoderm. In the sentence “The cat eats the mouse”, we must, by understanding all action like a predation, make of the endoderm the subject: because at the end the intestinal mucous, of endodermic origin, will assimilate the prey after the digestion. The assimilation objet (prey)-ectoderm, justifies itself by the fact that the ectoderm (…) builds the nervous tissue; and the nervous system, for the vertebrate, is an organ that simulates the state of the exterior world and who contains, at the states of engrams, the shapes of the preys.*”*Extracts from morphogenèse and imaginaire, René Thom, 1978, CIRCE
On prototype theory and family ressemblance
Consider for example the proceedings that we call 'games'. I mean board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? Don't say, "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games'"--but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them you will not see something common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! Look for example at board games, with their multifarious relationships. Now pass to card games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but many common features drop out, and others appear. When we pass next to ball games, much that is common is retained, but much is lost. Are they all 'amusing'? Compare chess with noughts and crosses. Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players? Think of patience. In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess and skill in tennis. Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how many other characteristic features have disappeared! And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
Ludwig Wittgenstein - Philosophical Investigations 66, 1953
from the article Prototype theory on wikipedia
Fuzzy logic
images extrated from mathworks siteFuzzy logic allows to build logic system on approximations. In this project, it could help us to reintroduce subjectivity in the way knowledge is understood and used.The first scheme show how a nonfuzzy logic produces a flat result based on a complex function and how a fuzzy logic reasoning produces a smoother result based on a simplier function.Fuzzy logic main expressions are IF for the variable, IS for the property and THEN for the action. The difference with statistic probablilist system is that there is no use of ELSE (0 or 1).AND, OR and NOT are used in Fuzzy logic systems to define minimum, maximum and complement in order to allow boolean operations.
