Definition by "Negation" - a way to understand, define, and describe a "thing"?

In relation to my earlier post on "what is learning"  and the notion that "learning" is association of things, I am thinking about another common way of expressing knowledge about something.

If you are learning or have knowledge about a concept, object, event and if we want to convey that to others, w take different approaches - give a definition (summary description) of what it is, a detailed explanation with examples, demonstrate it by building it, showing examples and counter examples, may be explaining the experience/feeling/emotion  and so on.

It is very interesting to note that many philosophers and also in religious/spiritual epics, the definition and descriptions is given in a strange way.  One may not explain the "thing" by telling what it is. But, you would narrate it by telling "what it is not".  It is very interesting why this approach is adopted especially by philosophers to explain complex phenomena which are very difficult to comprehend/understand. One such example is explaining what is Universe, purpose of life, God, etc. These are best explained by what it is NOT.  Because, (as I read somewhere), the moment you try try to define them in some way, it becomes so limited or boxed and hence, becomes wrong/imperfect. One may not be  able to explain all aspects of it, but then one can say, what it is not, by citing negative examples. So, the approach is to say, what it is NOT -  definition by negation - so that it is still OK even if we don't cover all. Also, it expects the audience to have vast amount of knowledge of peripheral subjects otherwise it doesn't make sense to say this is not X or Y if the audience are not aware of X and Y.

So,  a good observer or leaner knows more by understanding the difference between one new thing with everything he/she already knows and this knowledge of difference is the definition of the new thing (weird or upside down, right?).

I am struggling to give a good example of this "definition by negation".

Say, that you saw a strange animal in the forest.  You may say that it is not a Cat, but has four legs, fur, and short, but not whiskers, It is not a Tiger as it was moving very slow, ....., it is not a Rabbit as it was eating some worms or birds.

By explaining what it is NOT, we are narrating some attributes, if not all - by way of discrimination - a process of elimination.  This implies that we know more about the negative examples without which such elimination steps do not make sense.


Would appreciate better examples than mine  !!!

It is a long journey - Cognitive Science to Cognitive Computing - old theories are still very profound

In late 80's - more precisely 1988-91 -  I spent quite a bit time to read and (trying to) understand the "science of cognition' - chasing questions like - what is "knowledge"? ....  what is "reasoning"?...    the puzzles of language, learning, memory, inference, problem solving, philosophy of life, human mind, etc., etc. This was the time when I had a free hand to pursue research on topics of my interest and was bold enough to propose a "Center for Cognitive Science"  together with a thinker researcher colleague Dr.  B. N. Nair at Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in Trivandrum, India.

In fact, it is very amusing that I stumbled on a hand-written journal in which I was noting down important points from some of the books and articles I read at that time (photocopying was expensive then in India  !!!).  When I browsed through them again after 25 years - a time when cognitive computing is hot and fashionable - I see very valuable nuggets in the very old references starting from Aristotle. I may share some of those here intermittently.

Among different topics from my old journal, one thing that looked profound is a definition of knowledge from "Sankhya" Philosophy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samkhya)

"Knowledge is finding association about things. It is pigeon-holing one experience with the already existing fund of experience and this is one the great proofs of the fact that you can not have any knowledge until you have already a fund of knowledge in existence. There must be a store at hand to which to refer a new impression. Suppose a child is born into this world without such a fund, it would be impossible for that child ever to get any knowledge. Therefore, the child must have been in a state in which he/she had a fund and so, knowledge is eternally increasing"

Very thought provoking!!!  Need to digest it more even after I am reading these notes from many years ago!

What is Learning?

How do we define "learning"?  What makes one claim that he/she has learnt something new? What is a measure of learning? It is not IQ metric. It is not the level of diploma/degree or certifications. In some academic sense, it may appear to be the ability to remember and reproduce a fact, passing a test, being eligible of a diploma/degree. However, most of the learning happens outside the class rooms of academic institutions. According to "manu" (that's me!), there can be different manifestations of learning such as:
- ability to recognize the problem, its class, and relevant attributes
- ability to answer questions related to the topic
- ability to solve a problem that he/she couldn't do beforehand
- improvement in the performance of solving a problem
- interpreting fact(s)/data in different ways based on different contexts
- ability to analyze and establish/contradict the truth of a matter

Although the above can be (a partial set of) different facets of learning, it is even more complex to come up with a proper yard stick to measure the level of learning.

May be the "ability to establish/contradict the truth of the matter or proposition or statement" sums  up the "level of learnedness" .  need to ponder more on this .....

Why do we learn?

Learning is a complex phenomena involving our sensory inputs, memory, experience, and possibly many other factors. One thing that makes me ponder is the question such as what directs learning, why one learns from an environment one thing while others a different one and some none at all? My theory is that without an objective no learning occurs. The objective may be to do something better, pass a test, impress others, or even just a curiosity. Without any such motivating factor or objective, information presented, theories read, experiences sensed simply disappear as the scene changes or time passes. For example, given the same environment / scenario to many people, each of them may be assimilating or understanding differently based on what they "want" to gather and some may not pick up anything.

So, my point is that, the effectiveness of learning can be improved by instilling a wider set of objectives in the mind of the learner. Learning simply manifests as putting specific values in the the expected slots of the frame created by the learners' objectives.  Stronger is the learning when the fillers are clean, deep, tenacious!!!

More on "Objective-oriented Learning" again later ....