Does that avoid Russel's paradox? — Moliere

In a very rough form its how Z works, so yes.

What was the question?

sets have no "rules" for inclusion. — Moliere

Best acknowledge early that sets are best formed in stages, so as to avoid Russel's paradox. Start with individuals, then sets of individuals, then sets of sets of individuals, and never the twain.

As long as it is possible (logically consistent) for an organism to have a heart without a kidney, or vice versa, then the set of all possible instances of having a heart is different than the set of all possible instances of having a kidney, and thus these two properties are differentiated. — litewave

Yes, you are basically correct.

Lets take a closer look at what might happen were we to come across an organism with what appeared to be kidneys and yet no heart. We have a choice. We can decide that there are organisms with kidneys and yet no hearts, and say that the extension of "animal with kidneys" is different to the extension of "animal with a heart". Or alternately we could maintain that all animals with hearts also have kidneys, and simply say that although these organs do much the same thing as kidneys do in animals with hearts, they do not count as kidneys.

Now kidneys filter blood, which requires a circulatory system, which typically requires a heart. So the latter is probably the biologist's best option.

The Thomists amongst us see this as somehow nominalist and arbitrary. Btu that's how words work.

Yep, although "objects" is ontologically loaded - I'd use "individuals". And an individual is just what we give proper names to - "a", "b", "c" or "Moliere", Banno"

"Property" is a problematic notion for our Thomist friends, who puzzle over "what properties really are". Less so for more recent logic, which recognises that a property is a single-place predication, and not all that special. The Thomist might ask "But what IS redness, really?" and that whole structure of essences that ensues, while the modern logician might respond "It's just what 'x is red' expresses - nothing more mysterious than that."

That might well be what is leaning in to.

Russel's "box" metaphor doesn't work becasue a set just is it's elements. Asking if redness is red is a category error.

What exactly do you mean by "identify" here? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Identity can be defined extensionally using substitution, and without circularity. That's how it is done in modern logic.

A fine piece of work. Nice anticipation of objections, especially the modal objection. Are you studying logic?

There are problems, though. Perhaps not the ones identified by Hanover and Tim.

Here's perhaps the classic reply. Having a kidney is not the very same as having a heart, and yet all animals with kidney also have hearts. We can say that the extension of "Having kidneys" and the extension of "Having a heart" are the very same.

What we can say is that the extension of a property is just those things to which the property applies,

You are right to puzzle over the notion of a "property".

Note the reduction of wisdom to mere cleverness. Something has gone astray.

I was unable to follow that - you seem to think an idea emerges from a sentence, rather then a sentence expressing an idea.

And no, I wasn't talking about ideas, but about how the value of a currency does not emerge from the material from which the coins are made but is a result of how we treat those coins.

So why not just explain it properly. — Outlander

My Will To Power forbids me doing so.

The value of a coin is not a property of the coin. — noAxioms

Ok.

Aristotle again.


:roll:

I am not talking about currency but a coin. — MoK

Yep. Hence

The only available properties are the properties of parts though. — MoK

The properties of the coin include it's monetary value. But this is not a properties of it's parts.

Reductionism defeated.

No one's utterly useless - at the worst they can serve as an example of what not to do.

Fair suck of the sauce bottle. That was twenty five years ago.

It was about having to make a decision despite not having sufficient information, yes, but also about supposing that such decisions were the logical consequence of consideration of the available information - the conviction that one is choosing the best answer when in truth one is imposing one solution amongst many. That imposition is the ethical aspect.

Burns's Theorem — Srap Tasmaner

To a Louse or group theory? Both work. Which did you have in mind?


Added:

To see oursels as others see us!

I'm not sure the presumption of hierarchy is needed - you might understand me, and I, you.

Cheers.

The apparent contradiction - deciding what is undecidable - cuts to the heart of what it is to be rational. My Masters thesis was on organisations making decisions despite their being undecidable. But only the good undecidable decisions are wise... :wink:

Yep. The difficulty is that it is all but impossible to recognise one's own rigidities - one needs others to point them out.

A coin is a weak emergence since its property/shape is a function of the properties/positions of its parts. — MoK

That a coin is worth ten cents has nothing to do with it's composition. It does not emerge from some combination of the material properties of the coin, but consists in the way the coin is used.

Credulity is a powerful force.

Aren't there folk who are wise in some areas and dunces in others? — Tom Storm

Yes, I think so. I've been attempting to get AI to find instances of reference to "degrees of wisdom", without much success - using terms such as "greater wisdom," "much wisdom," "little wisdom". I'm looking for some sort of evidence, rather than just making shit up. My hypothesis is that if one is wise in some area, that's an end to it; there's no more or less involved. So absence of evidence confirms my hypothesis... :grimace:

We say "much more intelligent" and "a lot of knowledge", but not so "much more wise" or "A lot of wisdom" See this Ngram.

...fails intensification — Tom Storm

It's just that it seems odd to say someone is a little bit wise. You got it or you don't.

Do you agree?

I personally struggle to accept that today’s people are intrinsically unhappier and/or more foolish than previous generations or eras... — Tom Storm

To my eye that's more an excuse for rejecting more recent ethical values. I spent yesterday at a Voluntary Assisted Dying conference, and came away with an overwhelming belief that VAD is a moral good; one that would have been impossible to implement until recently. Quite the opposite of what proposes?

Is wisdom, when demonstrated, appreciated by others? — Tom Storm

Not sure. - but it does seem that while one might recognise wisdom in another, supposing oneself to be wise is... problematic. It's something one attributes to another.

I like it. — Tom Storm

Cheers. Austin's idea is to lay out the use of the word, get the lay of the land, so to speak. As opposed to just picking a definition and defending it to the hilt, the usual approach of the armchair warrior.

So as a first approximation, wisdom differs from intelligence, cleverness, being smart and so on, in its ethical implications,

There may be some benefit in further considering why wisdom fails intensification. Dose this show that it is valuable for its own sake?

Austin advocated looking up the definition of a word in a dictionary, then looking up each word in the definition, and then each word in the subsequent definitions, until a group of related words was identified. I asked Claude to have a go at this for me, and it produced the following groups:

• Judgment/decision/conclusion/opinion (evaluative processes)
• Experience/knowledge/facts/information/understanding (epistemic foundation)
• Ability/skill (capacity)
• Good/sound/valid/reason/sense (normative approval)
• Quality/standard (measurement/evaluation)

It then suggested on this basis that wisdom sits at the intersection of out epistemic and normative judgements. This last corresponds to my own intuition. To be wise is to achieve a good outcome.

Cheers.

Here's the ngram.

We might continue to do the sort of analysis Austin suggested, looking to subtleties and distinctions in our ordinary use of the word "wisdom". To begin, consider wise versus smart. Wisdom has a moral implication, but being smart is fairly neutral. Or wise versus clever; wisdom is never immoral, but clever can be. We say someone is intelligent when they demonstrate analytic capacity but wise when they make good judgements.

To say of someone is wise is to acknowledge their authority, but not if they’re a wise guy. A good choice might be the convenient choice, but a wise choice may be better in the long term.

You can be too clever by half but never too wise. You can be very smart, but can you be very wise? You can be quite wise. The fragility of intensifiers indicates that wisdom is an absolute quantity.

We have folk wisdom, Divine Wisdom (complete with capitals), ancient wisdom, and conventional wisdom. Wisdom can be possessed, accumulated and passed down. And even occasionally applied.

Better to be wise than knowledgeable or intelligent, and we have artificial intelligence, not artificial wisdom. Wisdom is earned by suffering and experience, not so knowledge or intelligence. We say someone is intelligent when they demonstrate analytic capacity but wise when they show good judgement.

Is it more serious if I question your wisdom than if I question your judgement?

A good Anglo-saxon word, none of your Mediterranean rubbish!

Old English wis, Proto-Germanic *wissaz, *wittos of PIE root *weid- "to see", although early uses seem to relate to practical stuff, trades and crafts - still seen in the suffix "-wise" as in clock-wise - "in this way". So it seems to shift from seeing (witness) to doing, then to knowing over time.

Oddly, "wise" and "video" are cognates. Having seen YouTube, I find that ironic.

But who cares? I don't. — bert1

Yeah, we can always just make shit up.

What if there is more than one description? More than one coherent set of properties?

This is a disk with a diameter of 23.60 mm and a thickness of 2.00 mm made from 75% copper, 25% nickel.

It's also a ten-cent coin.

Being a ten cent coin isn't an emergent property...

The only available properties are the properties of parts though. — MoK

...maybe not.

Its own ideology and mythology hold that capitalism is dominated by competition, the self-made, independent Man defeating his rivals.

However a business is only in competition with other business of the same type - with its competitors. Cooperation is at least as important. One must in deal both with suppliers and customers. The relation between a business and its supplier require long-term trust, shared information, and mutual adaptation - cooperation. And unless you are running a scam, you want your customers to come back again. A company that treats suppliers or customers as adversaries to be defeated rather than partners to work with will perform worse than one that builds collaborative relationships.

Capitalism is successful both because it enhances competition and cooperation.

The pretence that being selfish is amoral is inept. The claim that market-driven self-interest is somehow morally neutral - just a natural force like gravity - conveniently sidesteps the actual moral choices people and institutions make within capitalist systems. It's elevating that what you want to some sort of natural law. Pure selfishness actually tends to destroy the trust and cooperation on which complex social systems depend.

Selfishness destroys the market.

Systems are coherencies of differences between themselves and an environment. — Baden

A rock is coherent and there is a difference between a rock and a hard place.

Making America Alone Again

But what would an elderly Canadian know.

@Moliere

op cit.

Certainly,

I've never done such a thing. — Moliere

, ,
All good points. My reply is just that the rule is unenforceable, given that it is already all but impossible to tell how much of a piece is constructed by AI, and that doing so will only become more difficult.

But I'm not the one enforcing the rule, so there's that. Doubtless many posts are already at least partly written by AI. Maybe you two have special skills.

I'm not in favour of a forum that consist in an exchange of posts written by AI. I don't have an answer.




Far and away the commonest mistake on these fora is for folk to think they have an answer when they don't.


.

Respect for the rule of law assures compliance. — Hanover

Oh, indeed, you and I would never make use of AI...

It's a rule that is unenforceable in practice.

Remember when Ukraine agreed to give up its nuclear weapons for Security guarantees?

It don't go so well.

So the Orange Emperor had to pause a meeting with European leaders to check in with his boss in Moscow.

My only comment would be that he was banned for the wrong reason. The OP was rubbish, and the discussion did not improve on it.

That's an interesting thought. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Cheers. No more than a conjecture, and even a literature review would be a months of work.

Good counterpoints. I suspect that Aristotle's distinction between relations and substance is different to what I've suggested, since in first order logic relations are not so much an ontological category as a syntactic one. Any work here would need to avoid this category error. The various permutations would need to be worked through in detail. We might be heading in different directions yet again. And doubtless the development of these ideas was not complete in Aristotle. We've talked about the limitations of analogically reasoning previously.