[lit-ideas] Re: Philosophical points
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:13:49 -0230
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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