SUO: Re: Plea for Relements
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Tom Johnston wrote:
>
> And this does not collapse into solipsism because.....?
because there is nothing about taking the interpreter into account that says
all stories will make us equally "healthy, happy, and free". to the contrary,
considering the source and considering the audience are the first elements of
shining a critical light on a story's "truth" (its durability or immortality).
look, the lights did not go out
when we pulled the luminiferous
ether out from under the stars,
so what's the worry?
Jon Awbrey
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@att.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2003 3:01 PM
> To: sowa@bestweb.net
> Cc: Tom Johnston; SUO; port-l@listserv.iupui.edu
> Subject: Plea for Relements
>
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> John,
>
> I agree with this, and, in its cognitive application, for much
> the same reason that I am skeptical of the way that some folks
> do neural modeling -- it's too much to expect the human brain
> to have the neural equivalent of exact real number computation
> just in order to compute, say, either-or.
>
> Still, as I have suggested on numinous occasions, there is a good idea
> lurking behind fussy sets, which are after all just triadic relations,
> f : P x Q -> R, where P is a domain of elements, Q is a domain of sets,
> and R is the real domain, and f(p, q) is the "degree of membership" of
> the element p in the ordinary set q.
>
> Instead of the nuanced membership relation p in_r q, where f(p, q) = r,
> we can see that a logically more fundamental notion is the relativized
> membership relation p in^j q, where we say that p in^j q if the judge j
> judges the element p to fall in the set q (or to fall under the sign q).
>
> This notion of "interpretive membership" or "relative elementhood"
> is a useful way to talk about epistemic and ontological relativity.
>
> Jon Awbrey
>
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> John F. Sowa wrote:
> >
> > Tom,
> >
> > I agree:
> >
> > > Haack's "Philosophy of Logic" is an excellent book on the relationship
> > > between formal logic and patterns of reasoning in natural language.
> >
> > I cited her comments about fuzzy logic in my KR book:
> >
> > The philosopher Susan Haack (1978, 1996) was one of the early critics of
> > fuzzy logic, and she has continued to sharpen her arguments against the
> > claims that natural language justifies or even requires "degrees of truth".
> > Her most serious criticism is not that fuzzy logic is vague, but that it is
> > too precise: instead of modeling the way people talk and think about vagueness,
> > fuzzy logic forces an unwarranted quantification of vagueness.
> >
> > John
>
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