SUO: Re: Colorless Green Events Process Furiously
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Chris Menzel wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 18, 2003 at 01:00:26PM -0400, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> > It was a commonplace of my education -- I am sure that just about
> > every physics professor I ever had in that first couple of years
> > invoked it as a cliche observation -- that one of the reasons we spent
> > so much time fixated on the idea that particles were particles and
> > waves were waves and never the twain shall meet, not to mention
> > thinking that only one basis of description could be "God's Own
> > Ontology", so to speak, was all to be blamed, not exactly on the fact
> > that Indo-European languages have long maintained a form that
> > distinguishes nouns and verbs the way that they do -- for the language
> > itself is blameless -- but that people had somewhere got into the
> > habit of drawing illegitimate conclusions about Nature from the
> > structure of mere Language, and on this particular spit my teachers
> > usually roasted the Ancient Philosophers.
>
> Then your teachers were ignorant morons. Modern science *started*
> with the "Ancient Philosophers", whom we can thank for introducing,
> brilliantly, a world dominated by myth and unreason to logic, theory,
> and empirical observation. Your reasoning should be so "illegitimate".
>
> Chris Menzel
Chris,
Don't tell me, tell Pat Hayes.
Of course, I went ahead and read the Ancient Philosophers, and the
Continental Philosophers, and the Existential Philosphers, and the
Pragmatic Philosophers, and all the other Non-Analytic Philosophers,
and most of the other books on their Index, preciously because these
Authority Figures said not to bother, as Bertrand Russell was still
doing as late as 1950, by the way, but the point is, did all of these
morons nevertheless have a point, despite their Arrogant Illiteracy?
AI, there's the rub. My precious quest, though but a lowly _|_ feeder,
is whether I have enough creativity to make a different set of mistakes.
Jon Awbrey
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