@HPluckrose @ConceptualJames @janeclarejones just realized I don't need any fancy reading to explain different knowledges. Ordinal and Cardinal numbers are a perfect example. Say in the context of Decision Theory.
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The numbers 1,2,3,4,5 etc can either represent quantities or order. So, for example, I have 5 apples, but I came 5th in the running race (actually, I am really pathetic at running so that is highly unlikely). Counting and ordering can look the same in simple cases but aren't
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e.g. someone cheating changes the order even if you count people home.
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for decision making, I might order company priorities against costs of achieving them. But even though I am mixing ordinal and cardinal numbers to do this, I don't think the priorities 1 to 5 relate to actual amounts of prioritons.
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furthermore, and moving slightly away from the baby example, to something more profound. There is a considerable epistomological difference between Bayesian statistics and classical statistics. that is definitely different ways of knowing.
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Which reminds me of the joke about the engineer, the physicist and the applied mathematician when asked to put out a house on fire. The engineer rushed in with a hose, sprayed water until the fire was out and then sat down and worked out a ROM of how much water he had used 2/
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The physicist walked bravely into the fire and took careful measurements, calculating the rapidity of the flame spread, the retardance of the material, the heat exchange, worked out the amount of water to put out the fire and then used a hose to put it out 3/
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The applied mathematican walked off into another corner, built a small fire, got a pot of water and poured it over it. "Look, " he said, "Water puts out fire!". So - are there different types of knowledge and different ways of knowing. Well, "water puts out fire".
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This simply isn't what is being criticised, Richard. Different ways of empirically testing the same thing is not what postmodernists are talking about when they speak of the social construct of knowledge. You are missing the point again.
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