ONT Re: the tao is coi
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JA = Jon Awbrey
JC = John Collier
JA: So far your description of what you believe about norms
is limited to stating that it is less limited than mine.
If my norms may serve as lower bounds then I am content
to have them inform others of yours in this wise, but I
am sure that those who are thus informed would be happy
to receive some information just a bit more informative.
JC: Read my paper with Micahel Stingl on evolutionary naturalism on my web page.
JC: So you block by my view by usage. That is to set up a straw man.
That is what I have claimed you have been doing all along.
JA: On second reading I realize that I do not know what this means:
"So you block by my view by usage."
JC: You use words so as to make my view impossible.
I was taught that this is intellectually dishonest.
I was taught that it is physically impossible, short of a billboard.
[Non-text portions of this message have been deleted.]
JA: I merely elaborate my own insights
so as to make my usage transparent.
I don't see your view yet, nor how
what I have writ here can block it.
I simply said that it was my story.
Who blocks you from relating yours?
JC: You. By seeing only the superficial straw man. In any case, I have
listed a large number of other authors who take similar views on
logic and mathematics. You have claimed to have read them, but
it seems to me, not very well, with feeling. There are others
who understand me perfectly well.
JA: You must mean the kind of a feeling that feels itself empowered
to overwrite what is written. That is all that your arguments
from sentiment and from sympathy suggest to me. Strange as it
may seem, many copies of these books were printed, and many of
them formed the texts and the supplemental readings of my own
very first logic courses. Aside from dedicated proof-theorists
who admittedly don't care a wff about model theory, you are the
only person that I have ever run into who confused consistency
and satisfiability in this way.
JC: Only in your mind do I confuse them.
JA: Apparently some feeling of reading has moved you to read things that I haven't yet written.
I explained this at the beginning, but will make an effort to explain it more succinctly.
Despite the occasional pleasures of rhetorical rib-poking, my purpose is not to demonize
Aristotle, or Descartes, or Russell. I am viewing them merely as more or less visible
test particles in a cultural field, the dynamics of which I am trying to understand.
JC: This is considerably weaker than what you have said before.
That is what I was hoping to get from you.
This has been my working method for as long as I can remember.
I am pretty sure I explained it several times right up front.
JC: My solution, as I have mentioned, is to use concrete models to interpret
abstract ones, with ultimate access by ostention. This is consistent with
Russell's views, but I do not share his belief that only universals exist.
JA: From what you said earlier on, I got the feeling that "abstract" and "concrete"
are just one more couple of words that we probably use with different meanings.
To me, concrete objects are things like elephants, functions, graphs, or signs.
At any rate, the whole point of a sign relational framework is to permit us to
talk about the relationship of logical language to objective objects, and I do
not see any examples of it having been done well without such clear constructs.
JC: We do not use "concrete" and "abstract" significantly differently, as far as I can see.
Here is one of the places where I started to worry about that:
JC: A set of WFFs (an abstraction of abstractions) is inconsistent
if and only if they are necessarily false, i.e., there is no way
to assign contents (give an interpretation) such the every member
of the set comes out true. To make this non-abstract, a collection
of conditions must be defined that are real possibilities, and they
must be capable of being true together, and they can serve as an
interpretation of the WFFs. If there is nothing that fits the bill,
then either all of the WFFs have no such interpretation, or at least
some do, and the conjunction of these has no interpretation.
Maybe you could tell me why you call a set of wffs an "abstraction of abstractions".
JC: I have no quarrel with the project described, just with the critique you have used in
the past to justify it, and your positioning of it in intellectual history. That has
been my complaint all along. Slowly, you are accommodating it.
Accommodation is in the eye of the beholder.
Jon Awbrey
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