I’m reading a paper by Centola and Baronchelli. It describes a well-designed, ambitious experiment with interesting results. But I hit the brakes at this:<\/p>\n
\nThe approach used here builds on the general model of linguistic conventions proposed by Wittgenstein (39), in which repeated interaction produces collective agreement among a pair of players.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I’m always thrilled to see philosophy quoted as inspiration in a scientific paper, but in this case there’s a legitimacy problem: no one who ever actually paid attention to Wittgenstein is going to have the guts to gloss him that blithely. You don’t formalize into language a legendary demonstration of the non-formalizability of language without introducing and following your gloss with a bunch of pathetic self-consciously equivocal footwork. Also, Wittgenstein, I’m really really sorry for describing Philosophical Investigations as merely or even remotely about the non-formalizability of language.<\/p>\n
D. Centola, A. Baronchelli, (2015) The spontaneous emergence of conventions: An experimental study of cultural evolution. http:\/\/www.pnas.org\/content\/112\/7\/1989<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m reading a paper by Centola and Baronchelli. It describes a well-designed, ambitious experiment with interesting results. But I hit the brakes at this: The approach used here builds on the general model of linguistic conventions proposed by Wittgenstein (39), in which repeated interaction produces collective agreement among a pair of players. I’m always thrilled … Continue reading Yeah, I’m not sure that that’s the takeaway<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":[],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1798"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1802,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1798\/revisions\/1802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}