. It's not my job to immediately anticipate what is confusing you about the subject — TonesInDeepFreeze

I'm not saying it is. In fact I am saying it isn't. If it was, you wouldn't be too good at it. Still grateful for the clue though.

We started this discussion two or three days ago though.

too ample. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Too slow, rather. You could have said a long time ago: "you must mean the LNC, because the LEM does not actually rule out contradiction."

No need, you're not a very eloquent writer. It would take you ages.

It was just different, but logically equivalent in a system where both laws are in force, so it matters not. In fact I still think it is more elegant with an exclusive or because you only needs one law instead of two.

I've lapped all this stuff years ago. The LEM was presented as I said, with an exclusive or. Honest mistake.

I think I got the point you're making, which is -- correct me if I'm wrong -- that the LEM is different from the Law of Non Contradiction in that the "or" in LEM is inclusive and can accommodate (P & -P) which only the LNC excludes. Now, when I was taught formal logic, the 'or' of the LEM was described as exclusive. That is, either P or non P. And it's not my poor memory because it is still presented as such in the French wikipedia article about it, with such typical example as 'a door is open or closed.'

It seems therefore that as I was taught it, some decades ago in another country than yours, the LEM included the LNC by way of an exclusive or.

In any case, and this clarification being made, I agree with you that the 'inclusive or' version of the LEM is not the relevant logical law in relation to Wittgenstein's proposal to allow contradictions in mathematics. The LNC is.

And that would not contradict the LEM?

So anything of the type P & -P?

Add any contradiction as an axiom. — TonesInDeepFreeze

You mean, one by one?

You're stonewalling now. I'll leave you to it...

So how many folks are we talking about?

You are trying to bullshit yourself here. Read the article and quote the part where they say that "we're all going to get immune from covid eventually."

such talk is unhealthy and irresponsible during a pandemic.
— Olivier5

And yet...

There's no taboo that i know of on criticizing big pharma.
— Olivier5

...except the one you keep repeating. — Isaac

It's fine to quote articles but to call untold numbers of semi-mysterious people criminals is not.

I just want you to do the same for your claim that memory in the immune system is not 'becoming immune'. If that's too much to ask you're on the wrong site, this isn't Twitter. — Isaac

I've already explained it to you. Bis repetitas: 1) variants are a big factor. This thing keeps mutating and one may develop an immunity for one variant one has been exposed to but not to another; this is why we are not all immune to the flue as that bug too constantly mutates. 2) the article was based on blood samples taken from 50 individuals, 40 of whom had had covid. Results from blood analysis show that: " 95% of the people [38 people out of 40 if my math is correct] had at least 3 out of 5 immune-system components that could recognize SARS-CoV-2 up to 8 months after infection." It says nothing about their actual in vivo immune response, and extrapolating from 38 people to billions would be a bit iffy and so they don't do it either. 3) the finding is limited to this 8 month period and says nothing about what happens later.

These are verifiable facts. Just read the bloody article.

why would I go and ask someone to verify a claim you made? — Isaac

Because you don't want to take my word for it. What else could you possibly do to verify the claim? Ask me to write more and more stuff that you will quietly dismiss until i'm blue in the face? I don't see the point. It would not work in any case. There's none deafer than he who doesn't want to hear.

The argument is that you are borderline paranoid when you speak of untold numbers of semi-mysterious criminals like that, and that such talk is unhealthy and irresponsible during a pandemic.

Don't take my word for it. Ask any qualified medical doctor if your article claims that we will all become immune to covid eventually. I am confident they will agree with me that it makes a much weaker claim.

We're looking for the term 'becoming immune' being restricted to uses where immunity has been proven ex vitro to last beyond 8 months without chance of variants. — Isaac

'We all becoming immune' means what it means: that at some point in the future we will all be immune to covid. Aka herd immunity. But your article makes a much weaker claim.

What has the number of people got to do with the argument? — Isaac

It has to do with my dislike of sweeping criminal accusations addressed at untold numbers of semi-mysterious folks.

Del

In what way does a durable memory in the immune system not mean 'becoming immune'. — Isaac

In many ways, one of which is the constant emergence of new variants, another the finding is limited to period of 8 months after infection. Yet another the difficulty to extrapolate from in vitro findings to in vivo response.

The pharmaceutical corporations in question. — Isaac

So how many people are we talking about?

The immune systems of more than 95% of people who recovered from COVID-19 had durable memories of the virus up to eight months after infection. — literally the first sentence in the actual fucking article

"Durable memories up to 8 month" <> everybody becoming immune.

The Trump trope is precisely in this 'herd immunity' bs.

They are criminals — Isaac

Who is 'they' in that sentence?

that's saying that the pharmaceutical companies have behaved reprehensibly — Isaac

The way I read it, you painted a whole lot of people as criminals.

here

https://www.bmj.com/content/374/bmj.n2101 — Isaac

Nothing in this article says anything about "all of us becoming immune naturally", which is a trope from Trump, Bolsenaro and co.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/12/08/trump-cant-kick-his-coronavirus-herd-immunity-kick/

Quote them then. — Isaac

I have neither the time nor the appetite to dig through the whole stack but this is the kind of heavily paranoid stuff I am talking about:

So were faced with an awful situation. There's this crisis where millions are dying and one crucial part of the solution is a vaccine. But the only people who can make vaccines are these awful, criminal profiteers (I'm exaggerating only a bit). What do we do? If we say we can't trust the awful, criminal profiteers and tell them where they can stick their vaccine, a lot of people will die whilst we all become immune naturally. But does rejecting that option mean we have to march it in on a litter to fanfare, ticker-tape parades and cheering crowds, one for everyone...have one for the baby... No, I don't think so. I think we can, as I said, begrudgingly accept that we have little choice for those who really need it, but that's as far as we'll go and as soon as this thing's over... — Isaac

And where does this reference to natural immunity supposed to ultimately grace us all come from? Did you read this in a medical journal? I seriously doubt it.

So , in sum , if one understands context in a formal categorical sense, then the LEM is applicable in some contexts
and not in others. — Joshs

And then the interesting question (for me at least) becomes: in which types of contexts does it apply, and in which types of contexts does it not apply.

But if one equates context with absolute situational and perspectival contingency , then the LEM can no longer find the minimal categorical identity over time in the idea of context necessary for it to contribute anything useful.

My system crashed again. In other words, please?

The one we talked about:

[...] allowing contradictions in math is equivalent to dropping the law of the excluded middle from mathematical logic [...]
— Olivier5 — TonesInDeepFreeze

Wonderful. So now, how would you write down the proposal that we allow contradictions in mathematics, syntactically and semantically? What sort of axiom would that translate into, in your opinion?

You have in my view spread wholesale condamnations of governments, the medical establishment, the media and the likes, that were totally unfounded. These doubts of yours in your own doctors, ministers and journalists are coming from somewhere alright, but this 'somewhere' is not reality.

Sorry if I appear to trust doctors and my government(s) more than I trust you. I have what I believe are good reasons to trust doctors. For one, my sister is a medical doctor and I don't see that she is controlled by Satan. For two, them doctors saved my life twice.

But I have no reason whatsoever to trust you. Some of the things you write seem to come directly from Trump, so in fact I have reasons to mistrust you, as somebody who's thinking has been potentially tainted or parazited by post-truth BS.

Call it snide all you want. It's only snide when others do it to you, right?

what we make of that math does seem to be a matter for philosophers (and everyone else, really.) — hanaH

Why yes, we are all amateur philosophers anyway, even those of us who are professional mathematicians. And there is no subject matter that philosophy cannot legitimately discuss. Mine was a joke.

I've had many a discussion with contributors here who are convinced that ideas are essentially 'brain structures', and that the brain is shaped by evolutionary adaptation — Wayfarer

I think such a position is easy to rebut, in that it is a self-referencing negative statement structurally identical to the liar's paradox, or to "this sentence is false". The idea that ideas are essentially 'brain structures', if true, is itself a mere brain structure.

It's a point I used to make quite often here, at start, so I agree that this place (TPF) has more than its fair share of this kind of kindergarden version of materialism.

It's not about a paradox here or there. Rather Wittgenstein's idea was to happily welcome logical contradictions in mathematics.

I agree it will never happen. It was just another absurd idea from Wittgenstein.

And yet that could happen if they thought that the max compressive resistance of their concrete is say A, but also 2*A, and also 329*A. If we allow contradictions free reign in mathematics, everything follows.

You made a general statement about it. You made your own claim about mathematics and mathematical logic. And your claim is incorrect. — TonesInDeepFreeze

What claim are you talking about?

Either quote me ever saying that spreading unfounded doubts was not problematic, or argue like a grown up. — Isaac

The whole body of pro-vaccine responses on this thread (and the other) has been predicated entirely on that premise. You've said almost exactly that yourself only a few posts ago, about...

not spreading artificial doubt and confusion in the midst of a crisis.
— Olivier5 — Isaac

All the math involved in structural engineering requires is that it works; that it can effectively model things like tensive and compressive forces and the hardness, strength and flexibility of construction materials. — Janus

Yes yes yes but all this assumes that if the tensive strength of this material is X, it is X. It is not something else than X. There's only one correct value or range (+ or - whatever residual error).

But if this point, whatever its merits, has nothing to see with what Wittgenstein was saying, why do you bring it up in this thread?

Are you now saying that spreading unfounded doubts is problematic?

Things are the case or not the case within this wider sense-making space, which is context-sensitive. — Joshs

Yes to this, a universal rule. Statements and propositions are always made as part of a context, in a very real i.e. local, human sense of who says it, but also theoretically speaking as any statement is to be understood as part of a broader conceptual framework. There's no text in a vacuum. And yes, the truth value of a proposition (often even its meaning) always depends on this context.

The bottom line is that the meaningful
sense of S is P is a moving target , and what the LEM does is delimit how much the sense of the meaning of the proposition can vary before it becomes incoherent. At that point we blame each other for misunderstanding the definitions. — Joshs

This is where you lose me. I do not understand what you mean. That the LEM is not universally applicable, that it has a clear domain of applicability here but not there? If yes then ok, it's consistent with the above about propositions being true in certain contexts and not others.

Well then why did you say that it had nothing or little to see with the LEM, pray tell?

But, the rationalist’s claims appear incompatible with an understanding of human beings as physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.' — Wayfarer

I would think this part is unwarranted, in the sense that life is already semantic. Our physical bodies are semantic. The really hard problem to me is not consciousness but life itself. Given life, it was only a question of time for some critter to start recording and decoding information in real time so to speak, as information arises around the organism, information acquired through the senses and analysed through some (originally small) brain. These abilities (primitive eyes etc.) appear very very early in evolution.

From a critter that can look at something, to another critter that can reflexively look at itself looking at something, all you really need is some redundancy in brain power.

At some point in our evolution, there were about a dozen (known) species of Australopithecus, Paranthropus and Kenyanthropus and the likes. One of these most probably gave rise to the fist Homo species (habilis). All these species coexisted in Africa, sometimes in the same place but eating different things. The striking fact is that all of them shared, as a sort "special weapon", an inordinately large brain as compared to their body size.

If some platonic truth is out there, evolution can be seen as a very slow process of coming out of the cave.

Syntactically: P v ~P

Semantically: Every sentence in the language is either true in the model or it is false in the model (where 'or' is the inclusive or; while the 'but not both' clause for exclusive or is demanded by the law of non-contradiction: ~(P & ~P)). — TonesInDeepFreeze

Alright. And how would you write down Wittgenstein's proposal that we should happily welcome contradictions in mathematics, syntactically and semantically? What sort of axiom would that translate into, in your opinion?