[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophical points

Verily I tell thee that I have attended hundreds of academic conferences, have
played in countless chess and table tennis tournamnets, and have experienced
hundrees of powerpoint presentations. Thus have I died a thousand deaths.

Still learning how to die,

Walter O.



Quoting Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>:

> Eric Dean writes
> 
> > First, I completely agree that "there exists" is a problematic 
> > expression.  I think, though, that Quine's usage is both decipherable 
> > and coherent, though I do have my doubts about the entire program within 
> > which that usage makes sense.
> 
> What dire offense from logic textbooks springs
> What mighty contests rise from trivial things!
> 
> I think that the principle of charity should be applied to the 
> 'existential quantifier,' which can without loss of meaning be read 
> simply as 'there is?' 'There's a spot on your tie.' would be formally 
> written using the existential quantifier but this doesn't mean that what 
> the logician means is anything more than what the ordinary person means 
> by 'there is.' Logic is a formalization of stuff from elsewhere, mainly 
> ordinary language. Logical formalization is rarely more perspicuous than 
> that of which it is a formalization of: 'The cat is on the mat,' is 
> fairly easy, but 'Tom has six goats, two of which are for sale,' is more 
> difficult, and in formal notation less readily intelligible to the 
> common reader.
> 
> > The usage derives from the notion that time can be treated, for purposes 
> > of science, as a fourth spatial dimension.  In that sense, one can say 
> > "there exists" a time t such that..." in the same way one can say "there 
> > exists a point p such that...".  In this usage one can say "there is a 
> > time t such that t is greater than 5:00PM EST on March 21 2008 and the 
> > sun sets in Washington DC at t" and mean something like "the sun will 
> > set later this afternoon", tortured as such a way of saying it might 
> > be.  In the case of the restatement of "all men are mortal", this all 
> > cashes out as simply meaning that a mortal man will die some time, 
> > surely not a problematic notion on any construction.
> 
> This is interesting but I wonder if Quine meant any more than 'every man 
> will someday die,' which, as an empirical generalization I'd be inclined 
> to agree with. What counts as dying is often stipulative and different 
> criteria for death ('x is dead') have been advanced over the years. The 
> troublesome formalization cannot itself mean anything that can't be said 
> in ordinary language; it requires no occult interpretation, as far as I 
> can tell. Like Augustine, when I think about time, I understand it, but 
> when I try to explain it, I don't. In any event, it isn't the logician's 
> job to tell us when people are dead (or happy or male or female). The 
> logician's arrogance is perhaps an illusion: she's saying, in effect, 
> whatever you've agreed counts as being dead (happy, female, a True 
> Trotskyite), we'll use that.
> 
> > While such circumlocutions may usefully (?) make explicit the logical 
> > underpinnings of the mathematics which in turn underpin physics, I 
> > certainly agree that they're of dubious value in the case of "all men 
> > are mortal".
> 
> I think it was agree some time back that logicism (the attempt to ground 
> mathematics in logic, or in the logic of set theory), was a failure.
> 
> Robert Paul
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