Saturday, January 16, 2016

More on Measurement and Metrization


We earlier treated the matter of a metric on a topological space, in a series of essays beginning here:


Now, as lagniappe, we offer a pair of Metrization Epigrams, which the budding mathematician, stuck for an opener with that leotard-clad vision at the espresso bar, can use for a pick-up line:

 A discrete space is like the autistic atomism of the Tractatus, or Leibnizian monads.
An indiscrete space is (as one writer charmingly put it), “really quite crowded:  each point is an accumulation point of every other set.”  (One pictures the Jellyby children in Bleak House, ever tripping over one another’s legs.)

(Believe me, chicks go wild over such things.  Or at least, if you are like most gangly Adam's-apple-challenged graduate-students in math, it’s your last best shot.)

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It is by no means only topological spaces that one might wish to subject to a metric: all kinds of things, really:    Which species lie how close to which others (and different metrics -- phenotypic, cladistic, etc. -- yield different results);  which languages are neighbors in linguistic space (again there is a phenotypic/cladistic distinction:  descent vs. Sprachbund); which people have a natural affinity with which other (seating-plans at dinner-parties; blind dates; etc.)  And more generally, what is the curvature tensor of the noösphere?


As (from a philosopher of science):

One sometimes wants to say that a theory has much more testable content than some other statement:  for instance, the Newtonian theory has much more testable content than ‘The moon orbits the earth’.  But our apparatus, as it stands, does not entitle us to say this.  We have no metric for testable content.
--John Watkins, Science and Skepticism (1984), p.  185

Compare Keynes’ critique of relative subjective probabilities.

Here a noted philologian on the notion as applied to languages:

Was nun die Sache selbst anlangt, so meine ich  daß immer Sprache und Sprache, mögen sie auch noch so weit auseinander liegen, in wissenschaftlichem Sinn  enger zusammengehören  als Sprache und Literature, seien es auch die  desselben Volkes.
-- Hugo Schuchardt, “Über die Lautgesetze”  (1885), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2nd edn. 1928), p. 85

And here, indeed, he polemicizes against the nominalist treatment or ‘indiscrete toplogy” of diachronic linguistics:

Ist es denn nun nicht an sich ganz gleichgültig, ob rom. andare von adnare oder addare oder ambulare oder einem keltischen Verbalstamm herkommt;  ob in diesem Dialecte  l zu r  und in jenem  r zu l  wird usw.?   Welchen Sinn haben alle die Tausende etymologischer und morphologischer Korrespondenzen, die Tausende von Lautgesetzen, solange sie isoliert bleiben, solange sie nicht in höhere Ordnungen aufgelöst werden?
-- Hugo Schuchardt, “Über die Lautgesetze”  (1885), in Leo Spitzer, ed., Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier (1921; 2nd edn. 1928), p. 84


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This metaphor of ‘metrization’, outside the exact sciences, is very loose, as it is not strictly needed -- for taxonomic purposes, a more approximate neighborhood-system will suffice (a “Uniformity”) so to speak -- and still less is to be obtained.

As, a pair of British linguists comments:

Once recent attempt by French researchers  has given us the term dialectometry, which describes a formula for indexing the dialect ‘distance’ of any two speakers in a survey.  So far, the utility of the index has not been demonstrated.
--J.K. Chambers & Peter Trudgill, Dialectology (1980), p. 112

This, in the synchronic arena, is reminiscent of the glottochronology of Morris Swadesh, who attempted a sort of carbon-dating of linguistic evolution, based on an assumed universal rate of lexical decay, in the absence of direct evidence.



[Update 17 January 2016]  Another cautionary tale about the fetishization of metrics:

TWO of our most vital industries, health care and education, have become increasingly subjected to metrics and measurements. Of course, we need to hold professionals accountable. But the focus on numbers has gone too far. We’re hitting the targets, but missing the point.



Philologisches:
Whether, in that opening paragraph, the author wrote “metrics and measurements” intending to refer to two distinct though related concepts, or whether it was just an idle bit of synonymic accumulation like “bequeath and bestow” for those who might be unfamiliar with the somewhat technical word metric, is there unclear.  But it does raise a linguistic point.

The word metric, and its close kin meter, metrical, metrization, derive from Greek.
Mensuration and commensurable  go back to Latin mensura.
Measure comes ultimately from that Latin word as well, but via the phonetics of medieval French.
The same Indo-European root  is said to lie at the base of all of them.



English, an etymological patchwork, has some tendency to layer its vocabulary by origin, Greek roots being reserved for the most technical, followed by Latin,  with the Saxon vocabulary as jack of all work.  In this, it contrasts with German:  to Graeco-English oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen  correspond homely-sounding Germanic compounds Sauerstoff (‘sour-stuff’), Wasserstoff, Stickstoff.   And Freud’s German originals for the English ego and id, were nothing but nominalizations of the ordinary pronouncs, das Ich & das Es.

Roughly such tiering is at work in our Wortfeld of ‘measure’. 
Measure sounds reasonably English (though partly just because it chimes with pleasure and leisure, which are likewise French words in disguise), and is in everyday use for all purposes (though it also has technical specializations, as in mathematical measure theory).
Latinate mensuration (little used) is scarcely more than a stuffy synonym for ‘measuring’;  commensurate is literate and has everyday though businesslike uses (“a salary commensurate with the job responsibilities”); while commensurable is mostly technical, whether in its mathematical sense, or its more recent philosophic sense (“commensurable discourses”).
Metric is kind of a green-eyeshade/clipboard sort of word at best.  If becomes fully technical in mathematical uses like metric space and semi-metric,  finally soaring off into the intellectual empyrean with metrizable.


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Still wearing our lexicographer’s hat, here is an attestation for a word with which I had previously been unfamiliar, used by a philosopher of science.  After a rather confusing Gedankenexperiment judging the verifiability of a physical geometric hypothesis, involving all sorts of skulduggery with measuring rods, and “tampering with the semantic anchorage of the word congruent”  (that’ll get you two weeks in the clinky  without the option), and in which Albert Einstein (from beyond the grave) plays a role like that of Fantomas, battling the equally post-mortem shade of Pierre Duhem,  our professor writes:

The required resort to the introduction of a spatial dependence of the thermal coefficients  might well not be open to Einstein.  Hende, in order to retain Euclideanism, it would then be necessary to remetrize the space.  ….  Einstein’s geometric articulation of that thesis  does not leave room for saving it by resorting to a remetrization in the sense of making the length of the rod vary with position or irientation  even after it has been corrected for idiosyncratic distortions.  But why saddle the Duhemian thesis as such  with a restriction peculiar to Einstein’s particular version of it?  And thus why not allow Duhem to save his thesis by countenancing those alterations in the congruence definition which are remetrizations?
-- “The Falsifiability of Theories”, in: Adolf Grünbaum, Collected Works, vol. I (2013), p. 72-3

As indicated, I couldn’t really follow the dialectical taffy-pull in that conterfactual-strewn discussion, but simply the passage as though on one of those “citation slips” we used to rely on at Merriam-Webster.


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Just happened upon a passage which we quoted earlier in another context (here):  a use, by a mathematician (or if you prefer, a logician) of the in-itself-not-expressly-mathematical term measurement,  not in a technical mathematical sense such as measure zero or measure theory,  but sliding mathwards towards concepts very far from any plain man’s conception of “measurement” (as: wholly non-numerical, non-quantitative   fundamental group):

Mathematics is, as it has always been, largely the science of measurement.  But “measurement” must here be understood as referring to more than the meter stick.  The genus of a topological figures measures one of its aspects;  objects of genus zero  are in a sense simpler than those of higher genus. 
There are many dimensions of measurement ….:  characteristic, transcendence degree, cardinality, fundamental group … Occasionally we are so successful in the science of measurement  that we can completely characterize an object … by giving, as it were, its latitude and longitude:  its measurements in the relevant dimensions.
-- Herbert Enderton, “Elements of Recursion Theory”, in:  Jon Barwise, ed. Handbook of Mathematical Logic (1977), p. 554

I originally cited that as a not-especially-successful attempt (in its first sentence) at a one-line characterization of What Mathematics Is.    Measurement, in the usual sense, is common to a great many studious activities, from chemistry to engineering to dressmaking.   He only manages, in what follows, to make that characterization  more or less work, by moving the goalposts  and re-defining measurement in his own Pickwickian sense.

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