Bootstrapping

Comment: The word "bootstrapping" here means self-generating or self-sustaining through existing resources. In the context of CE Stoicism, it refers to the collective ongoing process of examining and possibly altering both the ideas defining the philosophy (the entailment net), and the group's self-coordinations (the nomic). The specific way people can bootstrap the entailment net you are currently reading is defined in CE Stoicism's nomic.

Bootstrapping is a way to start and to continue adding coherence to the entailment net and nomic, which CEStoicism uses to describe its constituting concepts and processes. Such a net could be started with a single node, presented as a web page (like this web page). A single-node net can be grown as people think of supporting concepts/processes, build them into nodes, and link these new nodes to the starting node and/or to each other. A single-node net could also be grown as people realize the single node contains separate concepts/processes, and creates separate but connected nodes to house these concepts/processes. Alternatively, a pre-populated net can open itself up to bootstrapping. As long as the will to continue bootstrapping exists, a net can be perpetually grown, developed, pruned, refined, and organized by continually examining the nodes and their relationships, and adding, changing, combining, dividing, grouping and subtracting nodes in an effort to better express the whole represented by the net. Thus, bootstrapping is a process for building, learning, teaching, updating, and cohering a set of related ideas. It is a sort of conversation.

... The term bootstrapping alludes to the legendary Baron Münchausen who was able to lift himself out of a swamp by pulling up on his own hair or his own bootstraps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping). The term acquired different senses in a variety of domains. For example, in computer science, this term refers to any process where a simple system activates a more complicated system. It is the problem of starting a certain system without the system already functioning, a process that may be portrayed as allegedly illogical or paradoxical the same as the Baron's legend. However, solutions, accordingly called bootstrapping, exist; they are processes whereby a complex system emerges by starting simply and, bit by bit, develops more complex capabilities on top of the simplier ones. ...

"The symbol-based epistemology used in AI is contrasted with the constructivist, coherence epistemology promoted by cybernetics. The latter leads to bootstrapping knowledge representations, in which different parts of the system mutually support each other. Gordon Pask's entailment meshes are reviewed as a basic application of this approach, and then extended to entailment nets: directed graphs governed by the “bootstrapping axiom”, determining which concepts are to be distinguished or merged. This allows a constant restructuring of the conceptual network.

...the problem with correspondence epistemologies is that they lack grounding: everything is built on top of the symbols, which constitute the atoms of meaning; yet, the symbols themselves are not supported. The advantage of a coherence epistemology is that there is no need for a fixed ground or foundation on which to build models: coherence is a two-way relation. In other words, coherent concepts support each other. The dynamic equivalent of this mutual support relation may be called “bootstrapping.”

"Knowledge, expressed as a network of nodes and links, can be structured in a better way by bootstrapping the distinctions between nodes, leading to the merging, differentiation or integration of ambiguously distinguished concepts...

...two concepts are distinct if and only if their input and/or output sets are distinct.

Although the bootstrapping axiom is formulated as a static, logical requirement, its practical value lies in the dynamic construction of new concepts (nodes) and entailments (links)."

A concept (node) is supposed to represent a distinction: a way to separate phenomena denoted by the concept (belonging to its class or extension), from phenomena that do not belong to its extension. Defining a concept means proposing a procedure for explicitly carrying out that distinction. Definition will be assumed to be a bootstrapping operation: a concept is always defined in terms of other concepts, that are themselves defined in terms of other concepts, and so on. In general there is no primitive level of meaningful concepts in terms of which all other concepts can be defined.