This is the third of 23 presentations in a series introducing and outlining my hypertext book project, "Application Holy Wars or a New Reformation - A Fugue on the Theory of Knowledge. The project explores the interactions of technology and cognition in the extraordinary evolutionary history of the human species. This 3rd session covers three things about the hypertext: (1) how it reflects scholarly/scientific understanding, (2) how this is implemented and may be published, and (3) my apps toolkit.

1. Session 3: Reading and writing a
massive online hypertext
William P. Hall
President
Kororoit Institute Proponents and Supporters
Assoc., Inc. - http://kororoit.org
william-hall@bigpond.com
http://www.orgs-evolution-knowledge.net
Access my research papers from
Google Citations

2. Tonight
 Before starting on content in the next
Meetup, I’ll discuss three topics about how
the book interacts with the world of human
knowledge
– How content in the book relates to the world of
scholarly and scientific knowledge
– How these relationships are implemented in the
book
– Survey of the tools used to write (and read) the
book
 Aspects of the book reflect on these topics
2

3. Creating and using
scholarly and
scientific knowledge

4. Learning to understand and resolve my paradigmatic
crisis
 PhD work based on 10 year study of chromosome variation,
systematics, and biogeography of sceloporine iguanid lizards in
North America (begun 1964 – finished at Harvard 1967-73)
 At UoM in 1978 a trusted reviewer accused me of being
unscientific in my approach to publishing my thesis research
– Spent two summers in the field with me and was my lab assistant for a year
– What was knowledge and what made claims to know something scientific?
 Ended up spending most of my time researching the history and
philosophy of sciences to understand the issues
– Hall, W.P. 1983. Modes of speciation and evolution in the sceloporine iguanid
lizards. I. Epistemology of the comparative approach and introduction to the
problem
4

5. Karl Popper, Evolutionary Epistemology and Radical
Constructivism
 Fundamental to all scholarship and our present exercise: what is
knowledge and how do we come to know things?
 Epistemology/theory of knowledge – a major theme of my book
– Karl Popper and radical constructivism: Knowledge claims are
cognitively constructed
 There is no direct connection between external reality (“truth”)
and any mental image/picture of that truth
 Sensation and consciousness of that sensation involves many
physiological transformation of information as the consequences
of an environmental stimulus propagate towards the brain
– Karl Popper: living entities construct knowledge of the world
through ideas/claims, trying out those ideas, and the
selective elimination of erroneous claims
 For more background see: Hall, W.P. 2014. Evolutionary epistemology
versus faith and justified true belief ― Does science work and can we
know the truth? Atheists Society Lecture, Unitarian Church, East
Melbourne, 12 August 20145

6. 1. PROBLEM IDENTIFICATION AND INITIAL SPECULATIONS
2. SELECT APPROPRIATE NATURAL ‘EXPERIMENTS’ AND
‘CONTROLS’ TO ILLUSTRATE PROBLEM
3. COLLECT DATA FROM EXPERIMENTS AND CONTROLS
4. DO CROSS-CORRELATION ANALYSES OF N-DIMENSIONAL
MATRICES TO IDENTIFY SIGNIFICANT PHENOMENA
5. GENERATE MODELS THROUGH ANALOGY, INDUCTION,
ETC. WHICH PROVIDE CAUSAL EXPLANATIONS FOR
SIGNIFICANTLY CORRELATED PHENOMENA
ARE
CORRELATIONS
FOUND
?
6.
IS MODEL LOGIC
OK?
SHOULD
MATRICES BE RE-
RANKED ?
6a. IS
MODEL LOGIC
OK?
8. TEST PREDICTIONS:
a. SAME PHENOMENA OF NEW CASES
b. OTHER PHENOMENA OF ORIGINAL CASES
c. OTHER PHENOMENA OF OTHER CASES
3a. COLLECT OTHER
NEEDED DATA
4a. FURTHER CROSS
CORRELATION ANALYSES
WITH NEW DATA
5a. REVISE AND/OR REPLACE
MODEL AS INDICATED BY
NEW CORRELATION
ANALYSES
9. TEST RECONSTRUCTIONS:
DO MODELS PLAUSIBLY
RECONSTRUCT CASES
ACCORDING TO EVIDENCE?
7. TEST ASSMPTIONS:
a. DEMONSTRATIONS
b. H D EXPERIMENTS
c. SIMULATIONS
OK
?
OK
?
OK
?
AND
10. A NATURAL PHENOMENON HAS BEEN IDENTIFIED AND UNDERSTOOD,
BUT THIS UNDERSTANDING SHOULD BE HELD ONLY AS LONG AS IT
PROVIDES REALISTIC EXPLANATIONS OF OBSERVATIONS ABOUT NATURE
NO
NO
NO
NO
NO
YES
YES
YESYES
YES
YES
YES
NO
NO
My answer to the
problem: How to
scientifically understand
real world complexity?
• Build, test & criticize as
as many connections as
possible between
theory and
reality
6

7.  Popper 1959, 1963
– We can’t prove if we know the truth
– There is no such thing as induction
– Deductively falsifying a theory is deterministic
– Correspondence theory of truth
– Make bold hypotheses and try to falsify them –
what is left is better than what has been falsified
– Falsifiability demarcates science from pseudoscience
 Popper (1972 – “Objective Knowledge”) biological approach
– Knowledge is a biological phenomenon
– Knowledge is solutions to problems of life
– All knowledge is cognitively constructed (Popper is a radical constructivist!)
– Falsification doesn’t work in the real world; claims can be protected by
auxiliary hypotheses (All claims to know must be regarded as fallible)
– Three worlds ontology
– “Tetradic schema” / “general theory of evolution” to eliminate errors and
build knowledge
 Many contemporary philosophers misunderstand Objective Knowledge
– “Objective knowledge” = knowledge codified into/onto a physical
object (DNA, printed paper, pitted CD, magnetic domains)
The early Popper vs. the mature Popper
on epistemology
7

8.  Vision does not form an image of
external reality
 The brain does not perceive reality, it
constructs a model
– Perception and cognition are
consequences of propagating action
potentials in a neural network.
– Action potentials stimulated by physical
perturbations to neurons
– Perception lags reality
 Problems
– “Problem of Induction” - any number of
confirmations does not prove the next
test will not be a refutation (e.g.,
Gettier)
– The biological impossibility to know if a
claim to know is true
Knowledge is constructed
Impossible to know whether a claim is true or not
8 Clock, via Wikimedia

9. 9
Popper’s evolutionary theory of knowledge
Natural selection builds knowledge (= solutions to problems)
Pn a real-world problem faced by a
living entity
TS a tentative solution/theory.
Tentative solutions are varied
through serial/parallel iteration
EE a test or process of error
elimination
Pn+1 changed problem as faced by an
entity incorporating a surviving
solution
The whole process is iterated
• All knowledge claims are constructed, cannot be proven to be true
• TSs may be embodied as “living structure” in the “knowing” entity, or
• TSs may be expressed in words as hypotheses, subject to objective criticism; or as
genetic codes in DNA, subject to natural selection
• Objective expression and criticism lets our theories die in our stead
• Through cyclic iteration, sources of errors are found and eliminated
• Solutions/theories become more reliable as they survive repetitive testing
• Surviving TSs are the source of all knowledge!
Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge – An Evolutionary Approach
(1972), pp. 241-244

10. Body of Formal
Knowledge
BoFK
“I” “WE” “THEM”
O
O
TTs
EE
Pn
O
EE
EXPLICIT
SUBMIT
EDITORIAL
REVIEW
PEER
REVIEW
EDITORIAL
DECISION &COMMENT
FORMAL PUBLISH
REWORK
BoFK
“I” “WE” “THEM”
O
O
TTs
EE
Pn
O
EE
EXPLICIT
SUBMIT
EDITORIAL
REVIEW
PEER
REVIEW
EDITORIAL
DECISION &COMMENT
FORMAL PUBLISH
REWORK
BoFK
“I” “WE” “THEM”
O
O
TTs
EE
Pn
O
EE
EXPLICIT
SUBMIT
EDITORIAL
REVIEW
PEER
REVIEW
EDITORIAL
DECISION &COMMENT
FORMAL PUBLISH
REWORK
BoFK
“I” “WE” “THEM”
O
O
TTs
EE
Pn
O
EE
EXPLICIT
SUBMIT
EDITORIAL
REVIEW
PEER
REVIEW
EDITORIAL
DECISION &COMMENT
FORMAL PUBLISH
REWORK
How is this reflected in scientific publishing?
Constructing formal knowledge
 Formal knowledge is considered “safe to use”

11. 11
Building the Web of Knowedge

12. How the book
connects to the
world of knowledge

13. 13
Hypertextually navigating the landscape of the
web of knowledge
 Paradigms are attractor basins (“swamps”) in the topography of the global web
of knowledge
 Links to the web access knowledge objects that help us cross
paradigm boundaries towards unification

14. Bibliographic connections
14

15. Footnotes
15

16. My tool kit

17. Nothing very special
 General idea
 Body of Formal Knowledge
– Web browser
– Access to eJournals
– Google / Google Scholar
 Microsoft Word
 Microsoft PowerPoint

 TinyURL
 Understand some HTML
 Adobe Acrobat17

18. There is a lot more to Scholar than meets the eye
18