(2) Consider next an example of an ill-typed variable. Suppose we are interested in the roles played by people in some community; we could not introduce an observable standing for those beauticians who depilate just those people who do not …What Gassendi seems to have in mind is that observables relating to tasting wine include the attributes that commonly appear on “tasting sheets”: nose (representing bouquet), legs or tears (viscosity), robe (peripheral colour), colour, clar…Adequacy/validation and coherence/verification neither entail nor support naive realism. GoAs ultimately construct models of systems. They do not describe, portray, or uncover the intrinsic nature of the systems they analyse. We understand …
Pierre Gassendi
philosopher · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Gassendi appears in the course as an early modern figure whose empiricist approach to sensory observation—particularly his detailed taxonomy of wine-tasting attributes—provides historical grounding for how observable properties get formalized in systems modeling. The readings invoke him to establish that observables are constructed through culturally specific frameworks (tasting sheets, descriptive vocabularies) rather than discovered as intrinsic features, which aligns with the course's broader argument that computational and cybernetic systems project structured models onto reality rather than revealing it directly. His work thus anchors contemporary debates about what counts as an observable in AI and machine learning within a longer genealogy of empiricism and its epistemological limits.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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