Re: Time, Causality and Demand-Pull
On Mon, Jun 12, 2000 at 10:20:33AM -0400, Josiah Lee Auspitz wrote:
>
> You've certainly got me pegged wrong, Chris. I was not trying to trip you
> up verbally but to suggest on your own terms, which do not happen to be my
> own, that in the exchange with Chris Partridge you are falling into a
> temporal version of Zeno's paradox, by neglecting the purposive principle,
> usually called an entelechy, that provides the thread of continuity and
> intelligibility which enables us to recognize a series of purposive acts
> as belonging to an activity.
Not sure I follow you here, Lee -- if I have neglected some principle
and my views are inconsistent, they will certainly remain inconsistent
if I add the principle (assuming, as I do, classical logic). Perhaps
all you are saying is that this idea of an entelechy is important for
representing certain processes adequately. Maybe so. There has been a
lot of discussion in PSL about process intent, which perhaps captures
some of what you have in mind. Problem is, things like purpose and
intent lead us into the Dark Realm of Intentionality, to be entered only
with the greatest care and trepidation.
> Of course, for any translation, there is always the question of what is
> lost. John Sowa's suggestion seems hard to rebut: that a view of process
> in which a space-time continuum is a primitive or even a prominent feature
> will "lose" something crucial in translation into a language like PSL
> grounded in timepoints and discrete occurrents.
Why do you think occurrences are discrete in PSL? PSL is silent on the
matter. And you seem to think that timepoints are inconsistent with the
idea of a s/t continuum, but timepoints can be given a continuous
topology. Certainly it was not timepoints per se that John was
questioning (though he did question taking them as primitive), but
rather PSL's assumption of linearity.
-chris
--
Christopher Menzel # web: philebus.tamu.edu/~cmenzel
Philosophy, Texas A&M University # net: chris.menzel@tamu.edu
College Station, TX 77843-4237 # vox: (409) 845-8764