Your understanding of each of the positions seems to make them trivial rather than controversial. — Count Timothy von Icarus
There are two questions with this pluralism/monism debate: What the heck is the thesis supposed to be, and Who has the burden of proof in addressing it? The answers seem to be, respectively, "Who knows?" and "The other guy!" :lol: — Leontiskos
I would agree that every quantification is into a domain, and I don't think there are context independent utterances. I do not think it follows that there is no metaphysics. I'm rather fond of it in fact, but the perspective I take on it is more like modelling than spelling out the Truth of Being. I think of metaphysics as, roughly, a manner of producing narratives that has the same relation to nonfiction that writing fanfiction has to fiction. You say stuff to get a better understanding of how things work in the abstract. That might be by clarifying how mental states work, how social structures work, or doing weird concept engineering like Deleuze does. It could even include coming up with systems that relate lots of ideas together into coherent wholes! Which it does in practice obv. — fdrake
And this sounds a lot like Srap's approach. I was encouraging him to write a new thread on the topic.
Plato's phrase, "carving nature at it's joints," seems appropriate here. I would say more but in this I would prefer a new or different thread (in the Kimhi thread I proposed resuscitating the QV/Sider thread if we didn't make a new one). I don't find the OP of this thread helpful as a context for these discussions touching on metaphysics. — Leontiskos
One of the great things about producing formalisms is that they're coordinative. — fdrake
But again, virtually no one wants to claim that truth should be both deflated and allowed to be defined arbitrarily. So we still have the question (even in the permissive case of Shapiro) about what constitutes a "correct logic." The orthodox position is that this question is answered in terms of the preservation of "actual truth." But we also see it defined in terms of "being interesting" (e.g. Shapiro). Either way, we are right back to an ambiguous metric for determining "correct logics," hence to common appeals to popular opinion in these papers. — Count Timothy von Icarus
That reads disingenuously to me. Your use of "roundness" previously read as a completely discursive notion. If you would've said "I think of a circle as a closed curve of constant curvature" when prompted for a definition, and didn't give Euclid's inequivalent definition, we would've had a much different discussion. I just don't get why you'd throw out Euclid's if you actually thought of the intrinsic curvature definition... It seems much more likely to me that you're equating the definition with your previous thought now that you've seen it. — fdrake
The latter of which is fair, but that isn't a point in the favour of pretheoretical reasoning, because constant roundness isn't a concept applicable to a circle in Euclid's geometry, is it? Roundness isn't quantified... — fdrake
Mathematical concepts tend to be expressible as mathematical formalisms, yeah. And if they can't, it's odd to even think of them as mathematical concepts. It would be like thinking of addition without the possibility of representing it as +. — fdrake
And therein lies a relevant distinction. Formalisms aren't prepackaged at all. In fact I believe you can think of producing formalisms as producing discursive knowledge! — fdrake
But you also seem to think the context you have in mind for any question that arises is the only context it can possibly arise in. — Srap Tasmaner
There will be Euclid circles in that space which are not Aristotle circles too, I believe. — fdrake
I believe "A closed curve of constant positive curvature" is the one the differential geometry man from above would've said — fdrake
We could say that a circle is a [closed] figure whose roundness is perfectly consistent.* There is no part of it which is more or less round than any other. — Leontiskos
The discussion about capturing the intended concept is relevant here. The interplay between coming up with formal criteria to count as a circle and ensuring that the criteria created count the right things as the circle. That will tell us what a circle is - or in my terms, what's correctly assertible of circles (simpliciter).
That's the kind of quibble we've been having, right? Which of these definitions captures the intended object of a circle... And honestly none of the ones we've talked about work generically. I believe "A closed curve of constant positive curvature" is the one the differential geometry man from above would've said, but that doesn't let you tell "placements" of the circle apart - which might be a feature rather than a bug. — fdrake
It might not be a confusion, it could be an insistence on a unified metalanguage having a single truth concept in it which sublanguages, formal or informal, necessarily ape. — fdrake
Edit: And why can't a quibbler say that R^3 and even R^2 spaces are not Euclidean? What's to stop him? When is a disagreement more than a quibble? — Leontiskos
But the deeper issue is that I don't see you driving anywhere. I don't particularly care whether the great circle is a Euclidean circle. If you have some property in your mind, some definition of "great circle" which excludes Euclidean circles, then your definition of a great circle excludes Euclidean circles. Who cares? Where is this getting us? — Leontiskos
Gonna call it for tonight and rethink stuff, though obviously not in your favor :D — Moliere
I'd appreciate you answering my question about whether or not paraconsistent logic would count as a plural logic insofar that we accept both paraconsistent logic and classical logic. — Moliere
Because every Aristotle Circle can be shown to be a Euclid Circle and vice versa. — fdrake
Then we're using Euclidean space differently. To me a Euclidean space is a space like R^3, or R^2. If you push me, I might also say that their interpoint distances must obey the Euclidean metric too. Neither of these are Euclid's definition of the plane. "A surface which lies evenly with straight lines upon itself" - R^2 isn't exactly a surface, it's an infinite expanse... But it's nice to think of it as the place all of Euclid's maths lives in. R^3 definitely is not a surface, but it is a Euclidean space. — fdrake
You also disagree with him strongly if you like Euclid or Aristotle's definition of a circle. I actually prefer his, since you can think of the car wheels as its own manifold, and the one he would give works for the great circle on a hollow sphere too. I think in that respect the one he would give is the best circle definition I know. Even though it individuates circles differently from Aristotle and Euclid. — fdrake
I'm not familiar with Aristotle's definition of a circle at all. I might not even understand it. Though, if I understand it, I think the two definitions are equivalent in the plane. So there's no disagreement between them. Which one's right? Well, is it right to pronounce tomato as tomato or tomato? — fdrake
early 13c., preien, "ask earnestly, beg (someone)," also (c. 1300) in a religious sense, "pray to a god or saint," from Old French preier "to pray" (c. 900, Modern French prier), from Vulgar Latin *precare (also source of Italian pregare), from Latin precari "ask earnestly, beg, entreat," from *prex (plural preces, genitive precis) "prayer, request, entreaty," from PIE root *prek- "to ask, request, entreat."
From early 14c. as "to invite." The deferential parenthetical expression I pray you, "please, if you will," attested from late 14c. (from c. 1300 as I pray thee), was contracted to pray in 16c. Related: Prayed; praying. — Pray Etymology
An incline plane in a Euclidean space is definitely a Euclidean plane. An incline plane can't contain a circle just rawdogging Euclid's definition of a circle, since an incline plane is in a relevant sense 3D object - it varies over x and y and z coordinates - and is thus subsets of it are not 'planar figure's in some sense. — fdrake
However, for a clarified definition of plane that lets you treat a plane that is at an incline as a standard flat 0 gradient plane, the "clearly a circle" thing you draw in it would be a circle. — fdrake
I have had a similar experience to this. It was a discussion about rotating an object 90 degrees in space, and having to consider it as a different object in some respects because it is described by a different equation. One of the people I spoke about it with got quite frustrated, rightly, because their conception of shape was based on intrinsic properties in differential geometry. I believe their exact words were "they're only different if you've not gotten rid of the ridiculous idea of an embedding space". IE, this mathematician was so ascended that everything they imagine to be an object is defined without reference to coordinates. So for him, circles didn't even need centres. If you drop a hoop on the ground in the NW corner of a room, or the SE, they're the same circle, since they'd be the same hoop, even though they have different centres. — fdrake
Which might mean that a car has a single wheel, since shapes aren't individuated if they are isomorphic, but what do I know. Perhaps the set of four identical wheels is a different, nonconnected, manifold. — fdrake
I can't tell if you're just being flippant here (which is fine, I enjoyed the razz), or if you actually believe that something really being the case is impossible to demonstrate in maths (or logic). Because that would go against how I've been reading you all thread. — fdrake
So where are abstractions taken from? I suggest "the world" is a sensible answer, and one that explains the "mystery" rather well. — unenlightened
If you have 23 objects you have already mathematicised them by counting — unenlightened
The incline plane does let you see something important though, you might need to supplement Euclid's theory with something that tells you whether the object you're on is a plane. Which is similar to something from Russell's paper... "For all bivalent...", vs "For any geometry which can be reduced to a plane somehow without distortion...". The incline plane can be reduced to a flat plane without distortion, the surface of the sphere can't - so I chose the incline plane as another counterexample since it would have had the same endpoint. But you get at it through "repairs" rather than marking the "exterior" of the concept of Euclid's circles. Understanding from within rather than without. — fdrake
I think this is a good line of argument. I had thought of physicalism, also metaphorically, as kind of a snake pit where whenever one snake pops its head up and you cut it off, another one simply reappears in its place, reflecting the adaptive ability of physicalism to proliferate new versions of itself in response to new objections. This overall amorphism seems highly suspect in the context of scientifc endeavour. But then the question arises, as you and others have pointed out, is it really realistic to presume you can entirely rid yourself of that type of problem and "just do" science under the guidance of methodological naturalism or some other supposedly more neutral framework? Aren't there snakes everywhere? Aren't there metaphysical commitments inherent in making your job philosophically coherent as an enterprise?
I think to an extent there are. And an associated problem is even finding generally accepted definitions of the concepts in question, so that hard lines can be drawn. Perhaps the scientific method, methodological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism (including physicalism) can be placed on a kind of spectrum of increased commitment and perhaps even that modest enterprise has its complications. — Baden
But I still think its useful to try to get out Occam's razor and try to do what we can, especially when one finds oneself defending science against ideological and metaphysical encroachment in general. — Baden
But qualitative studies do play a part in science and the soft sciences are absolutely drenched in philosophical commitments, particularly structuralist ones. Though, again, there is some kind of division envisioned between methodologies and metaphysics, it's very hard to see where that line really is. That's probably a conversation that's too broad for the scope of this thread, though I won't deny its relevancy. — Baden
Though I can see you're not having it. — Moliere
I'll start with your first premise. "...is false" presupposes no such thing as an assertion or claim -- like I noted earlier "This duck is false" could mean "This duck is fake", right? — Moliere
Note too that, "This sentence is false," is different from, "This sentence is false is false," or more clearly, " 'This sentence is false' is false. " Be clear on what you are trying to say, if you really think you are saying something intelligible at all. Be clear about what you think is false. — Leontiskos
"This sentence is false" is all I need. — Moliere
How can you insist that one is more correct than another? — fdrake
If they are different theories then they define different things, i.e. different "circles." The monist can have Euclidean circles and non-Euclidean circles. He is in no way forced to say that the token "circle" can be attached to only one concept. — Leontiskos
Alright. It just surprises me that you survived all of these different things to do with maths concepts with a strong intuition remaining that there's ultimately one right way of doing things in maths and in logic, and that understanding is baked right into the true metaphysics of the world. — fdrake
Neither of us disagree on what Euclidean, taxicab or great circles are at this point, I think. So they're not "slippery", their norms of use are well understood. The thing which is not understood is how they relate to the, well I suppose your, intuition of a circle. — fdrake
But the deeper issue is that I don't see you driving anywhere. I don't particularly care whether the great circle is a Euclidean circle. If you have some property in your mind, some definition of "great circle" which excludes Euclidean circles, then your definition of a great circle excludes Euclidean circles. Who cares? Where is this getting us? — Leontiskos
I would say that someone correctly understands a mathematical object when they can tell you roughly... — fdrake
I wouldn't say I understand the object well yet, nor what theorems it needs to satisfy, but I have a series of mental images and operations which I'm trying to be able to capture with a formalism. — fdrake
I also don't want to say that all objects are "merely" stipulated, like a differential equation has a physical interpretation, so some objects seem to have a privileged flavour of relation to how things are, even if there's no unique way of writing that down and generating predictions. — fdrake
I don't know what to tell you other than you learn that stuff in final year highschool or first year university maths. If you're not willing to take that you can do those things for granted I don't know if we're even talking about maths.
Maybe we're talking about Leontiskos-maths, a new system. How does this one work? :P — fdrake
Of course you can. If someone tells you that modus ponens doesn't work in propositional logic, they're wrong. — fdrake
More normative. It's not correct to assert that modus ponens fails in propositional logic because how propositional logic works has been established. — fdrake
they're norms of comprehension, and intimately tied up with what it means to correctly understand those objects. — fdrake
Someone who was familiar with the weirdness of sphere surfaces, eg Srap Tasmaner, will have seen the highlighted great circle, said something like "goddamnit, yeah" — fdrake
Yes
Here I am using it, no? Its use-case is philosophical, rather than pragmatic, but I don't think that makes it meaningless. — Moliere
To use ↪Srap Tasmaner 's division, this example is in (1). A child can understand the sentence. — Moliere
"Duck is false" and "2+3+4+5 is false" don't work because "Duck" and "2+3+4+5" are not assertions at all, but nouns. — Moliere
The pronoun in "This sentence is false" points to itself, which is a statement. — Moliere
"This sentence is false" — Moliere
That isn't strictly speaking true, it's just that the generalisation of the concept of planar figure which applies to circles is so vast it doesn't resemble Euclid's one at all. You can associate planes with infinitely small regions of the sphere - the tangent plane just touching the sphere surface at a point. And your proofs about sphere properties can include vanishingly small planar figures so long as they're confined to the same vanishingly small region around a point. — fdrake
What I was calling shit testing is the process of finding good counterexamples. And a good counterexample derives from a thorough understanding of a theory. It can sharpen your understanding of a theory by demarcating its content - like the great circle counterexample serves to distinguish Euclid's theory of circles from generic circles. — fdrake
Good shit testing requires accurate close reading. This is how you come up with genuine counterexamples. — fdrake
Q1. Why is the number 23 not divisible (evenly) by 3?
Q2. Why are 23 objects not evenly divisible into three collections of whole and unbroken objects? — J
What we really want is an explanatory structure that preserves both of the seemingly ineluctable realities – of logic and of being. Kimhi has his views about how we might get there. A theistic argument might posit a “perfect match” because creation is deliberately thus. Or – using a metaphor from Banno – we find ourselves with a Phillips-head screw and a screwdriver that matches, so let’s leave a designed creation out of it and try to work on the problem in evolutionary terms. (I don’t think such an approach will take us far enough, but it’s certainly respectable.) — J
You forgot that Euclid specifies a circle as a plane figure. — fdrake
I realise you're not going to accept that a great circle is not a Euclid circle, or that a circle in a plane at an angle isn't a Euclid circle without a repair of his definition — fdrake
Yet perhaps it is not a torus but is nevertheless a set of coplanar points, falling on an implicit plane which possesses a spatial orientation. Is it a circle then? Not strictly speaking, because two-dimensional planes do have not a spatial orientation. — Leontiskos
I've been using the word "verbatim" to try to mean a couple of things:
A ) At face value.
B ) Using only the resources at hand in a symbolic system.
Thus Euclid's definition of a circle, verbatim, would exclude the great circle. — fdrake
And if you want to just talk about your intuitions without recourse to formalism, I don't know if this topic of debate is even something you should concern yourself with. — fdrake
If you actually want my perspective on things, rather than trying to illustrate points from the paper: I'm very pragmatist toward truth. I prefer correct assertion as a concept over truth (in most circumstances) because different styles of description tend to evaluate claims differently. As a practical example, when I used to work studying people's eye movements, I would look at a pattern of fixation points on an image - places people were recorded to have rested their eyes for some time, and I would think "they saw this", and it would be correctly assertible. But I would also know that some subjects would not have had the focus of their vision on some single fixation points that I'd studied, and instead would have formed a coherent image over multiple ones, in which case they would not have "seen" the area associated with the fixation point principally, they would've seen some synthesis of it and neighbouring (in space and time) areas associated with fixation points (and other eye movements). So did they see it or didn't they?
So I like correctly assertible because it connotes there being norms to truth-telling, rather than truth being something the world just rawdogs into sentences regardless of how they're made. "There are 20kg of dust total in my house's carpet"... the world has apparently decided whether that's true or false already, and I find that odd. Because it's like I'm gambling when I whip that sentence out. — fdrake
I would agree that every quantification is into a domain, and I don't think there are context independent utterances. I do not think it follows that there is no metaphysics. I'm rather fond of it in fact, but the perspective I take on it is more like modelling than spelling out the Truth of Being. I think of metaphysics as, roughly, a manner of producing narratives that has the same relation to nonfiction that writing fanfiction has to fiction. You say stuff to get a better understanding of how things work in the abstract. That might be by clarifying how mental states work, how social structures work, or doing weird concept engineering like Deleuze does. It could even include coming up with systems that relate lots of ideas together into coherent wholes! Which it does in practice obv. — fdrake
I would have thought it clear how it relates to logical pluralism. If you model circles in Euclid's geometry, you don't see the great circle. But if you look for models of the statement "a collection of all coplanar points equidistant around a chosen point", you'll see great circles on balls (ie spheres, if you don't limit your entire geometry to the points on the sphere surface). They thus disagree on whether the great circles on balls are circles.
If you agree that both are adequate formalisations of circlehood in different circumstances, this is a clear case of logical pluralism. — fdrake
Let's suppose it is a countermodel. How does the logical pluralism arise? I can only see it arising if we say that a "circle" means both Euclid's definition and the great circle countermodel, and that these two models are incompatible. Is that what you hold? — Leontiskos
The taxicab example is designed as a counterexample to the circle definition "a collection of all coplanar points equidistant around a chosen point", since the points on the edge of the square in Euclidean space are equidistant in the taxicab metric on that Euclidean space. It isn't so much an equivocation as highlighting an inherent ambiguity in a definition. — fdrake
The extensional difference between all of these different formalisms are the scope of what counts as a circle. A pluralist could claim that some definitions work for some purposes but not others, a monist could not. — fdrake
To put it in super blunt terms, Euclid's theory would have as a consequence that the great circle on a ball is not a circle. The equidistant coplanar criterion would prove that the great circle on a ball is a circle. Those are two different theories - consequence sets - of meaningful statements. A pluralist would get to go "wow, cool!" and choose whatever suits their purposes, a monist would not. — fdrake
You might not even be a logical monist in the OP's sense, since the kind of logic it's talking about is formal? — fdrake
So we have (1) the primary phenomena, everyday language use and reasoning.
Then there's (2) the way logic schematizes these.
And there's the further claim that in carrying out (2), we see (3) the deep structure of everyday language and reasoning, the underlying logical form.
My claim was that we can talk about (2), whether (3) is true or not, and even without considering whether (3) is true or not.
It's the same thing I've been saying all along, that (2) doesn't entail (3). — Srap Tasmaner
Each time you state the problem in terms of artifice or invention you fail to capture a neutral (2). Do you see this? To call logic an invention of artifice, or a schematization or formalization, is to have begged the question. If that's all logic is then the answer to (3) is foreclosed. — Leontiskos
Fair enough. Part of the issue here is whether pluralism can be set out clearly. As the SEP article sets out, the issue is as relevant to monism as for pluralism. The question is how the various logics relate. It remains that monism must give an account of which logic is correct. — Banno
You've made it plain that you don't accept Dialetheism, and will give no reason, so the point is moot. — Banno
It's like "This sentence has six words" in some ways — Banno
Point well-made and taken. That should have been further qualified as all spherical lines of circumference. That's what I meant. That's what I was thinking. Evidently a few synapses misfired. — creativesoul
Just wondering if I've understood something. — creativesoul
My interest was piqued by the claim that a line of circumference around a sphere was a circle. — creativesoul
My position was that there are circumstances in which it makes sense to say there are square circles, perhaps even that there are circumstances in which one can correctly assert that there are square circles, not "there are square circles" with an unrestricted quantification in "there are". — fdrake
I'm not really sure what you are arguing, fdrake. It doesn't sound like you hold to logical nihilism or logical pluralism in any strong or interesting sense. Am I wrong in that? — Leontiskos