[Wittrs] Nominalism / Sean
- From: "jrstern" <jrstern@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:37:43 -0000
--- In Wittrs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, Sean Wilson <whoooo26505@...> wrote:
>
> ... one of the things that I have always felt irritating
> about philosophy is the false issues it creates by birthing
> schools of thought. Nominalism. Idealism. Realism. Etc.
Wittgenstein.
> If people would speak at the level of examples, there would
> less in philosophy to disagree about (to the extent there
> is anything to disagree about).
The cat is on the mat.
That's an example.
But as soon as I go a bit further,
we have things to disagree about.
> Josh, can you give me an example of "nominalism" in terms
> of behavior? What would I need to do to be one, and what
> would make this any different than being Catholic or a
> Steelers fan?
Very fair question.
I don't have a ready answer, let me try to cobble
one together.
First, I certainly agree that it is hazardous to depend
on any -ism to either support or oppose. As a nominalist
I am committed to a strong skepticism about any such general
terms anyway! But, that does not necessarily mean we should
not use them. As a weekend gardener I am committed to a
strong skepticism about the safety of this chainsaw, but
that does not necessarily mean I should not use it. Indeed,
that care is what I recommend everyone have, as I recommend
they use a chainsaw when needed, rather than try to cut down
trees with a dull spoon, out of some overstrong commitment
to safety.
Second, I get very nearly as steamed at the use of terms
like realism and anti-realism, as they are generally used
to reflect how the speaker/school looks at things like
beliefs, not at how it looks at things in the world. The
conventional usage of these terms makes nominalism an
anti-realist theory, when the whole motivation for it
is a naturalized realism about the world and everything
in it.
Third, it is certainly incumbent on me to put forth many
examples and much theory and meta-theory, because my
computational nominalism isn't particularly in print,
anywhere. A lot of it is tacit in much of computation
practice and computer science and I see a nod to it in print
now and again, but never any details. That's on the
philosophy side, compsci is still and perhaps forever
largely and proudly un-philosophical in its habits.
So, an example.
Let me take one that is in Fodor's LOT 2, except that
he never looks at it as nominalism, either. And that
is Frege puzzles. How can we think that Hesperus is
the evening star and Phosphorus is the morning star,
when in fact they are the same? Frege worried a lot
about this, because if what we know must be truth,
there must be an explanation, somewhere, somehow,
of how, in effect, language lets us down.
(this being my reading of things, not the one you
get from Fregean and neo-Fregeans, for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frege%27s_Puzzle
)
Fodor's solution is nominalist in all but name.
(Fodor is another who is often very 'creative' in his
attribution of ideas to -isms and names). Chapter 3
of his LOT 2 book is "LOT meets Frege's Problem
(Among Others)". To make a short story extremely
short, Fodor suggests that any (computational,
representational) theory of language must be able to
support separate but co-refering tokenings of
semantic types. That simple! Nothing puzzling,
just a basic property of a certain theory of
what language is. Very Wittgensteinian dissolving
of a puzzle that never was. Fodor finds his
explanation for this in that the theory is
computational (CTM = computational theory of mind):
"CTM slices mental states thinner than
mere PA psychology does"
(p 70)
Soooo, *my* take on this, is that we *still* need
much, much more detail on just HOW it is that
computation *does* this slicing. I am not happy
with how Fodor tries to explain this, I do not
think that he even reflects on the mundane details
of computation such as any practicing programmer
knows things. Fodor is right, in fact he is
righter than he knows, but it needs work.
So, as a nominalist, if you find yourself in a
room full of neo-Fregean New School of Reference
Kripkeans, talking of Twin Earth and necessity
and rigid designators, ... you shake your head
a great deal, and probably fall asleep. The
correspondence to these observable behaviors is
going to be much stronger for nominalists, than
for Catholics or Steelers fans.
And if someone asks you, "WTF was Wittgenstein
talking about when he said that how one extends
the series 2,4,6, ... is normative and not
rule based", you may have an answer, involving
nominalism, but for details on that, I refer
people to Shanker#1. Well, I'm much more fond
of nominalism (and computation) than is Shanker,
so let me try just a bit more here, though it is
hard to do concisely what takes Shanker a couple
of hundred pages.
(um, and please note, "normative" is not
"nominalist", and is also not "nomological",
these similar no- words drive me crazy)
My nominalistic take on this is that even
language itself, is made up of particulars,
that even any rule is a string, any word is
a string, as Hesperus and Phosphorus are two
different strings, as the rule for generating
terms in a sequence of 2n are strings. They
have no meaning until the strings are computationally
processed. And - here's where it gets good! -
and then, just like when you observe a photon
and the wave function collapses - and then,
the word or rule (or a proof surveyed, in
Witgenstein's RFM), ... and then, yes, within
the context, the word or rule *does* have a -
that's *a*, not *the* - meaning.
So, there ya go, fwiw, a nice melange
of Wittgenstein, Fodor, Shanker, Bohr -
and Stern. And a lot of what I've tried
to add is really elaborated Turing.
So, if you want to be something like a
computational nominalist, when someone asks,
"Is the cat on the mat?", you can give an
answer, because you know, sufficient for
the moment, what is meant,
and what conditions are, and how to
compose a response. You know how to
play what games there are, you are not
afraid that a use with a meaning is
somehow beneath your dignity, or
such a metaphysical problem that it
should not be attempted.
Josh
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