Words as acts of faith

Continuing on from yesterday's post...

Every time a person accepts and uses any word (symbol), she is making a leap of faith. This leap may be very small, but there is a degree of unprovenness in every semantic symbol. The small (or large) disconnect between mental symbols and the universe at large means that we are all acting on faith.

I have to go on faith that the thing I am about to sit in is really a chair, and not a convincing replica made of flimsy paper.

I have to go on faith that the word I'm using matches the word-meaning others have. Somewhere along the way, I got wind of the notion of "spoon" and now I belive in the concept "spoon".

So, if this is an act of faith, bridging the physical and mental world, who are the evangelists? What is the process / mechanism that causes me to accept a new symbol?

This gets more interesting when you think that there are lots of words that are once, twice, or more removed from direct reference to actual phenomenon. Symbols build upon symbols. The leap of faith depends on a multitude of other leaps.

Trust enters in here, just as it would in more obvious cases. If someone you know and trust says "This is a RAM chip" (assuming you have no prior experience with what RAM chips are), you will immediately internalize the new symbol and you will be ready to use it in the future. If a stranger, especially a suspicious looking one, comes up to you, looks both ways to make sure nobody is paying attention, and whispers "This is a RAM chip" while showing you a piece of electronics (again, assuming you have no prior experience with RAM chips), you will probably not be as willing to go into the world at large and use the term "RAM chip" in other contexts.

So, as a software developer, someone who formally manipulates symbols in code, how do I reconcile the process of programming with this idea that all symbol usage requires leaps of faith?? Let's try this hypothesis (relating to OO programs that model concepts outside of the computer hardware realm):

Programs do not really utilize symbols (in the sense here, a symbol being a construct that models the universe at large). Programmers do. Programmers formalize their mental models by capturing their belief systems in code. Programs execute and faithfully carry out these instructions.

Computers without belief systems will never be anything more than instruction-execution machines.

© Copyright 2005 Steve Land. Last update: 4/21/2005; 8:21:44 AM.