At 02:17 PM 5/20/99 -0700, Dan Plante wrote:
>The difference between the two is therefore the differenve between
>knowledge and understanding, so applying that translation to "descriptive",
>I guess I would have to say.....
>
>prescriptive?
>
>Hmmmmm. What is it you're trying to do, David?
Differentiate models that represent the world as it is versus models that represent the world as it should be. Specifically a belief such as "people should be nice to each other" is a normative belief (in my understanding). How would you qualify the belief that "people are not always nice to each other"?
What I'm trying to discern here is that beliefs of the former (normative) type don't have a truth value. You can agree or disagree with them, but you can't measure any correspondence between them and reality. Only representations that purport to describe reality in some way have a truth value (I claim).
-- David McFadzean david@lucifer.com Memetic Engineer http://www.lucifer.com/~david/ Church of Virus http://www.lucifer.com/virus/