New chapter starts tomorrow: Where have all the logicians gone over the course of the past thirty years? Why haven't logicians stepped forward to help as our discourse has floundered and failed?
You're asking some very good questions! Below, you see links to last week's reports from the missing logicians file:
Tuesday, December 4: A la recherche des logiciens perdus! When 7 plus 5 equaled 12.Tomorrow, we'll start a new report. We'll call it the paradox file.
Wednesday, December 5: Russell and Wittgenstein, up in a tree! An anecdote runs through it.
Thursday, December 6: Acolytes aped Wittgenstein! Years later, the Horwich Conjecture.
Friday, December 7: He built upon the logic of Frege and Russell! But what kind of "logic" was that?
It will take us back to Professor Goldstein's book about "the greatest logician since Aristotle." We won't talk much about Godel himself. Instead, we'll review Goldstein's work.
None of this will actually matter, of course. It seems to be maybe too late for that—and we humans don't seem so inclined.
Logic helps with failures of reasoning. It doesn't help with deciding matters of fact. Logic is only as true as the truth value of your premises, which is established a priori. The problem with today's discussion is that people do not agree on the facts -- factions have their own sets of so-called facts and some even lie. Logic will not help sort that out. This is why Godel was so concerned about the truth of original premises. He knew that his proofs could not establish their truth, only the correctness of the logic applied to them to extend knowledge. Wittgenstein and others have been preoccupied by the extent to which natural language can capture meaning and approximate truth of statements. They worried about that because they believed that people inevitably and only thought using language. Now we know that isn't true, but the relationship between the language expressing premises and the reality that language is meant to encapsulate remains important to philosophers because the whole edifice of reason rests on an assumption that the two are the same. The amount of difference matters.
ReplyDeleteSomerby ignores all this in favor of ad hominems against philosophers and journalists and liberals. Somehow The Others escape criticism. I wish he would stop this nonsense. He is wasting everyone's time.
"He is wasting everyone's time." They said that about Cassandra as well.
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