RE: SUO: RE: Plea for Relements
John:
sorry for being so cryptic. I did not mean "solipsism" in the full
philosophical sense. Instead, my question was aimed at this remark:
>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).
I think that a passage of Quine's was in the back of my mind (surprise!).
Here it is:
"The uniformity that unites us in communication and belief is a uniformity
of resultant patterns overlying a chaotic subjective diversity of
connections between words and experiences. Uniformity comes where it matters
socially; hence rather in point of intersubjectively conspicuous
circumstances of utterance than in point of privately conspicuous ones......
Different persons growing up in the same language are like different bushes
trimmed and trained to take the shape of identical elephants. The anatomical
details of twigs and branches will fulfill the elephantine form differently
from bush to bush, but the overall outward results are alike". (Word and
Object, p.8, Chapter 1, section 2).
So this logically fundamental notion describes the twigs and branches.
Somehow we develop "a uniformity of resultant patterns" that enables us to
communicate well enough to have greater survival value socially than we do
individually. I wonder how (as do psycholinguists, cognitive scientists and
all of us). That's all my question alluded to. As such, it probably wasn't
very relevant.
Tom
-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
Sent: Wednesday, August 27, 2003 9:17 PM
To: Tom Johnston
Cc: Jon Awbrey; SUO; port-l@listserv.iupui.edu
Subject: Re: SUO: RE: Plea for Relements
Tom,
The following discussion addresses a technical point
about the model-theoretic foundations of conventional
logics and fuzzy logics.
It is by no means a complete theory of ontology and
epistemology, which solipsism purports to be.
Tom Johnston wrote:
> And this does not collapse into solipsism because.....?
Most people who take Peirce seriously, including Jon and
me, assume the existence of a physical universe populated
with people and other sentient beings, who have minds
that operate along principles roughly analogous to our own.
Peirce was very explicit about debunking Descartes's
error of doubting things in his philosophy that he would
never doubt in practice. That point was never in question
in the following exchange.
John
> -----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
>
> 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
>
> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
>
> 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
>
>
> o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o~~~~~~~~~o
>
>