End
notes
- Reality
section in Aristotle's logic - Why Aristotelian
logic does not work
- Analogy: attempting to make patterns between ‘two’
separated real objects or ‘situations’.
Situations are also objects, happenings in the real world.
Happenings are moving ‘or’ interacting objects.
All reasoning using analogy, while often useful (pragmatic), is essentially
sloppy – that is, empirically unsound and should, therefore, always
be used with caution and close, conscious attention.
To suggest anything can be empirically sound runs into problems, including
the error
called ‘complete’. To suggest that a ‘theory’
(description) is ‘empirically sound’is unacceptable. What can
be said is that the description has, thus far, been sufficiently
useful for human communication and purposes.
Empiric refers to the real world. A description of the real world (in
words) remains a description. The world is what it is, it is not the
description.
A description, however, is of itself ‘part’ of the real
world.
- As with all words in this section, a meme is a small
programme running in your head. For more discussion, start here.
These programmes are not static. As with a computer programme, they
can be modified with experience. It is the real world impingeing on
the senses which, sensibly, drives modofications in the memes. Unfortunately,
society is still at a primitive state where ‘it’ attempts
to force predigested memes into the heads of the young in the form of
‘dogmas’.
Only by allowing reality to drive the refinement of the memes can one
approach sanity.
Always remain aware that the memes are mere approximations to reality,
not substitutes for reality.
For more on memes, visit section
on memes in useful links
- In mathematics you will see comments like “let
x ‘equal’ ” . This means you can put any ‘thing’
at all into this category (set). You will see from Gödel’s
confusions: Metalogic A, in much detail, that this is no safe
or innocent practice.
Many call mathematics ‘abstract’ for reasons
apparently similar to this.
- See also the
error of to be.
Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) 1832–98
English writer and logician
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful
tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more
nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make
words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to
be master—that’s all.”
Through
the Looking-Glass (1872), chapter 6.
- Other strongly held ‘beliefs’ are also
often mis-referred to as ‘dogma’, even though those beliefs
may better accord with reality but not with the beliefs of another.
- “Trust actions not words”— Niccolò
Machiavelli, 1469 – 1527.
a more exact quote would be desirable.
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