SUO: RE: Re: Policy On Substitutions
Dear Jon,
See comments below.
Regards
Matthew
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Matthew West
Operations & Asset Management
Shell Services International
H3229, Shell Centre, London, SE1 7NA, UK.
Tel: +44 207 934 4490 Fax: 7929
Mobile: +44 7796 336538
E-mail: Matthew.R.West@is.shell.com
http://www.shellservices.com/
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> Matthew,
>
> Maybe I need to say that I mean "eliminating variables"
> in the sense of "explaining them away", in other words,
> more like "taking them off the list of basic concepts".
MW: Precisely, if you can explain them away, then you know they
are OK, without having worry about what they are.
>
> My particular worries here, to the extent that I can even remember
> what they were all about from twenty or thirty years down the line --
> though I do recall the appropriation of various phrases that I had
> probably learned in numerous other contexts, where I described the
> core feeling as "ontological insecurity" or a "semantic equivalent
> of free-floating anxiety" -- but I think that all of that business
> just meant that, whenever it came to "abstract algebraic subjects"
> as abiding over and above "concrete arithmetic subjects", I simply
> had no determinate sense of what all the equations and expressions
> and formulas were ever supposed to be denoting, in the first place.
>
> So I am not exactly sure how to come up with a less abstract example,
> as the whole problem only came up in the relatively abstract domains
> of algebra and what we were once accustomed to call "symbolic logic",
> as if it were some brand of purely and thoroughly modern methodology.
>
> The satisfaction that arises from finding a relatively
> concrete denotation
> for "open expresions", "patterns", "schemata", "templates",
> or whatever you
> want to call them, whether in algebra or in logic, is simply
> the feeling of
> being able to point to a definite "meaning", in the sense of
> an extensional
> reference that abides, moderately contentedly, in the realm
> of instantiated,
> constant-saturated expressions, each of which has, if
> evaluated, a constant
> value in some ordinary domain of "arithmetic" values, say
> booleans or reals.
>
> The sense in which one is successfully "explaining variables away"
> is just this, that one comes to regard them as incidental devices
> for getting down to the actual references of the open expressions.
>
> This is and ought to be a fairly unsurprising solution to the
> worry about variables, but it does involve a subtly different
> attitude toward the subject matter than any of the approaches
> I had previously taken up, as it takes regarding the level of
> signs or syntactic entities, for instance, the above sorts of
> constant expressions, as a distinct reality or real dimension
> in and of itself. And treating these significant expressions
> as significant in their own right, not simply as something to
> be cashed out as quickly as possible for the indicated values,
> this marks the first stirring of a sign-theoretic sensibility.
> It also means that one has to regard a whole set of instances,
> not just a few of them, as being the real bearer of the sense.
MW: So variables are signs that refer to more than just one thing?
>
> Speaking of sense -- did this make any at all?
MW: Really quite clear - thanks.
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
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