CHAPTER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 各章致谢

Transcription

1 CHAPTER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 各章致谢

2 CHAPTER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS What follows are the acknowledgments that accompanied the articles here republished as chapters of the present book. The original phrasing of the acknowledgments has been retained to preserve their original intent. However, most of the acknowledgments of the fifth article have been restyled with a different title as 21 of Chapter Five. The little that is not retained in 21 of Chapter Five appears below. 1. Accompanying the Article Republished as Chapter One I thank Dr. Michael R. Powers, Professor of Risk Management and Insurance at Temple University s Fox School of Business and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Finance at Tshinghua University s School of Economics and Management, for reading and commenting on the present paper. In explaining the Monty Hall problem to students, Professor Powers prefers to have recourse to the method known as conditional probability. But he also believes that different approaches may supplement one another. I am grateful to Prof. Dr. Andreas Manz, Head of Research at the Korean Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) at the University of Saarbrücken, Germany, for inviting me to participate in a workshop held at KIST on June 30-July 2, 2010 (see At this workshop, I read a lecture entitled How the Biological Brain Reasons: The Four Digital Operations Underlying All Rational Language and Thought. The lecture concerned the digital analysis of rational thought and language. The ideas presented therein have inspired the present paper on the Monty Hall problem. I was also grateful for the opportunity to be able to present some ideas on the digitalization of the analysis of rational thought and language on April 28, 2011 in a lecture entitled The Inevitable Digitization of Language Analysis and read in the Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations of the University of Toronto, in the framework of an Information and Discussion Session on the topic Does It All Add Up? Quantitative Reasoning (QR) in the Humanities. Finally, I thank two anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this paper for their critical and penetrating comments. These comments have necessitated a complete overhaul of the paper. 143

3 PROLEGOMENA TO THE THEORY OF RATIONAL HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 2. Accompanying the Article Republished as Chapter Two When the present article was essentially complete, a fortunate set of circumstances brought the author in contact with Dr. Richard D. Gill, Professor of Mathematical Statistics at the Mathematisch Instituut of Leiden University in the Netherlands, who has contributed a number of studies to the analysis of the Monty Hall problem. An interesting exchange of ideas ensued about all sorts of facets of the expanded Monty Hall problem and about the contents of the present article. I personally profited much from this exchange. One result of the exchange was the decision to include, for the benefit of a somewhat more interdisciplinary audience, an appendix by Professor Gill (see 8). The design of this appendix is to provide additional context by building a bridge to modern probability theory in its conventional notation and by pointing to the benefits of certain interesting and relevant tools of computation now available on the Internet. A more detailed and in-depth description of the common concept of the hypergeometric distribution in its relation to the contents of the present article remains desirable and will need to be postponed to future papers. The present collaboration is meant as a first step conceived and executed on short notice, an exploratory effort that probes what is possible in terms of interdisciplinary projects spanning both the humanities and the sciences. I am grateful to Professor Gill for his willingness to make this much appreciated contribution. As regards the interdisciplinary nature of the larger project of whose mathematical branch this article is part, one ulterior aim is to promote the perfect unity of notation of Boole s algebra and the complete unity of human intelligence that it suggests, in that the notation can be applied to the following multiple facets of human intelligence, each illustrated here by one expression. 1) The sun shines (Language, Level of the Things). 2) When the sun shines, I go to the beach. (Language, Level of the Events). 3) Humans are mortal. Socrates is a human being. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. (Logic, but not just with three statements, as in the present example, but with any number of statements). 4) A quadratic equation (Quantitative mathematics). 144

4 CHAPTER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 5) The Monty Hall problem (Digital mathematics, in addition to quantitative mathematics). Finally, I also thank Dr. Michael R. Powers, now Professor of Risk and Insurance Mathematics at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, for his continued interest in the subject matter of this article and for fruitful discussions in this connection about the essence of probability in both its strictly mathematical and its more subjective interpretations. 3. Accompanying the Article Republished as Chapter Three I am grateful for two opportunities to present versions of this paper to audiences, first in the form of a lecture addressed on Mar. 20, 2008 to the members of the Semitic Philology Workshop of Harvard University s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, at the invitation of event organizer Na ama Pat-El, and second as part of a paper read at the international conference on Language Typology and Egyptian-Coptic Linguistics held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig on Oct. 2-5, 2008 and organized by Sebastian Richter and Martin Haspelmath. I also thank the founders of for having hosted a provisional version of the present paper on their website until it was accepted for publication. I am also grateful for comments provided by referees of the version of this paper initially submitted to this journal. They have done much to improve the paper. 4. Accompanying the Article Republished as Chapter Four I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments. The reviewer ventured to guess that the article results from a dissertation. But it is rather just the first installment of what is supposed to be several. It is not quite certain how additional installments will take shape. But the hope is that any such forthcoming will propose a more or less complete account of rational human intelligence. 145

5 PROLEGOMENA TO THE THEORY OF RATIONAL HUMAN INTELLIGENCE While the preceding pages are concerned with intelligence, I believe with Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon that, in the end, style is everything and models are desirable. In that regard, Giovanni Battista Pergolesi has been inspiring. Traveler and author Charles Burney described his style as singularly clear, simple, and true, in addition to being sweet. Bach seemed like too many notes for the occasion. The more I do mathematics, the more it seems to me as if the search for understanding is a pursuit of the adage Know Thyself. It was my unexpected confrontation with J. C. Maxwell s work that encouraged me to at least try and tackle the topic of rational human intelligence comprehensively rather than piecemeal and I owe some valuable hints in relation to electrodynamics to Rei Ukita, an undergraduate student in engineering at Brown who took my ancient Egyptian literature class. This confrontation was a bit of a Proustian moment, less important for its contents than for its trigger effect, enhanced by a visit to Illiers-Combray in early June 2013, after the cathedrals at Amiens, Beauvais, and Chartres (dutifully listening to the sacred music of Pergolesi at each station) and before the Loire Valley castles at Chenonceaux, Cheverny, and Chambord and elsewhere. Let others judge what to make of this attempt to chercher la vérité en moi seeking the truth in myself when en face de quelque chose qui n est pas encore facing something that is not yet. If others give it a try too, we will at least be able to compare notes. 5. Accompanying the Article Republished as Chapter Five I acknowledge the suggestions and comments by an anonymous reviewer who realized that this paper by someone who is not strictly a mathematician may not be the traditional mathematics paper yet deemed it worthy of publication. 146