HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle
Date: 6 Nov 92 00:12:06 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

In article <TORKEL.92Nov5225053@lludd.sics.se> torkel@sics.se 
(Torkel Franzen) writes:

>In article <1992Nov5.205117.12672@klaava.Helsinki.FI> amnell@klaava.Helsinki.
>FI (Marko Amnell) writes:
>
>   >By the Law of Excluded Middle I mean any philosophical principle that
>   >says that sentences of some language (formal system, natural language)
>   >can only have the truth values "true" or "false".
>
>  What does this mean? Mind, I am as fanatical a realist as ever walked
>the surface of the earth, but this makes it no easier for me to understand
>this talk about truth values. What does it mean for a sentence to have
>a truth value, and what are the truth values "true" and "false"?

Frege's conception of the truth values was of them as pure Platonic
objects, and of propositions as functions with "true" and "false"
as values.  I don't know how many people can believe this today.
Our age has been permanently changed by the influence of psychology.
But, how is one to define truth without reference to objective
truth values?  One way is to follow Horwich's minimalism in his recent
book _Truth_ and assert that the meaning of truth is exhausted by 
saying that a sentence (or statement, proposition, I don't want to
get into the truth-bearer debate here) is true just in case the
state of affairs it describes obtains in the world.  This is the
dis-quotational theory of truth.  It is purposefully empty of any
explanatory content.

To me, the notion of truth must include some kind of correspondance
with reality.  If we define reality as the Truth about the world
(following Peirce) then this idea of correspondance is illuminated
somewhat.  A sentence I assert is true if it corresponds to one of
the infinitely many true timeless propositions that make up the
ultimate objective reality.  These include mathematical propositions
(maybe a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, maybe a proof of the 
consistency of NF, or maybe not) and propositions that would be
expressed in physical theories.  To over-simplify again, a TOE
in physics would be some sub-set of the Truth in a Peircean sense.
I'm using these ideas in a purposefully loose way here, just to give you
a rough idea of how I'm trying to link up the definition of truth with
the metaphysical problem of reality.

So, what are the truth values?  I don't know.  They are some way that
we have of expressing that a certain state of affairs obtains in the
real world or it does not.  But, of every possible state of affairs,
is it the case that it obtains or does not?  This is the question of
the status of the Law of Excluded Middle.  We have this ability of
ascribing truth or falsity in our language.  But we don't understand
what it is.  I don't believe the minimalists.  I think that the idea
of Truth is linked to the idea of Reality, as Peirce suggests.

-- 
Marko Amnell
amnell@klaava.helsinki.fi
Graduate Student in Philosophy
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: tucker@mitre.org (William Tucker)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Keywords: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, USA
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 23:08:25 GMT


Leo Smith says in response to Torkel's and Marko's dialogue:

[stuff deleted]

Surely formal systems are just tools: we are looking to generalise and
simplify our experience such that we can condense it into general
rules. This has utility. It is easier to teach a child that 'all
moving cars are dangerous' than it is to recount the deatails of all
the automobile accidents one has witnessed... but that doesn't make
it nearly as TRUE as the recounting of all that data...and the data
itself is only a reference to the presupposed actual events....


I (William Tucker) agree:

An abstraction is necessarily that which removes from consideration what
need not be considered NOW. However when you proceed with multiple abstractions
you get the same results as you would in mathematics or science when you have
a "neglected" amount(s) or "margins of error," the error multiplies. Perhaps I'm mistaken but, I don't remember seeing this discussed before, nor am I familiar
with any regular method for dealing with it. Is there?


Leo continues:

.. perhaps I could say that for me, it is not such a binary thing as
correct or not correct: There is existence. Maybe. I don't and can't
know. What I DO know is what experience I have. This is the nearest
to the Truth that I can get, and having been accused of being a
mystic on this group, I suppose that means that using the experience
as the starting point of the model. 


I (William Tucker) say:

Whether they realize it or not all philosophers deal with their own personal
experiences exclusively. Information enters via sensorial means period.
What we percieve of as truth is that which matches our experience. We can
link groups of past experiences together into patterns, this cutting and
pasting of events to get a "story" is called intelligence...the ability to see similarity in seemingly unrelated experiences. 



Leo continues:

Then the memory of the experience
is another layer, and further away from one sort of reality, the
reality of direct experience, is The Model. That is the series of
generalised internal constructs and guidelines that we use to
manipulate our experience. The way we store it and refer to it
internally. THAT is what a realist calls Reality IMHO. He calls what
I call Reality mystical babblings :-)

[stuff deleted]


I (William Tucker) think:

If that is what the realist calls reality then he again defines his world
in terms of his tools and as such drops a signicant portion of the "out there"
onto the floor. Your mystical babblings are IMUHO lucidity in prose.


ps.

Kudos to mister M. Zeleny and M. Rooney for your brief but hilarious 
burst of pretentious/outrageous and french innuendo, my apologies to those
who took it seriously.

Wm T.

.standard disclaimer
From: amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Date: 8 Nov 92 12:37:39 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

In <1992Nov6.183933.16613@guinness.idbsu.edu> holmes@garnet.idbsu.edu 
(Randall Holmes) writes:

>I am a realist myself, but I do not think that Truth is required in
>order to search for truths.  This is fortunate, since it seems clear
>that Truth (as an abstract object) does not exist.

This is the point where the relativist jumps in and says that since
there is no ultimate standard of truth, but only individual truths
in such and such circumstances, there is no objetive reality.  He
would seek to undermine your realism by questioning the validity
of your conviction that there is an objective standard of fact.
If there is no ultimate Truth, what can you appeal to besides
contingent cirumstance?

If it turns out that Truth cannot be defined in any logic, it could
still play the role of what Kant called a regulative idea of the
understanding.  Our reason, said Kant, eschews the idea of God or
an immortal soul, but we can use these idea as `limits' as it were
to reason.  In a similar way, the notion of Truth as the "ideal end
of inquiry" regulates our search for individual truths.  It is almost
a question of faith.  We have faith that science is taking us closer
to the Truth, although our reason eschews Truth as a completed totality
because it is paradoxical (supposing that it turns out this way).

-- 
Marko Amnell
amnell@klaava.helsinki.fi
Graduate Student in Philosophy
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Plato's Views on Women
From: RGINZBERG@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Ruth Ginzberg)
Date: 11 Nov 92 07:43:20 EDT
Distribution: world
Organization: Philosophy Dept., Wesleyan University
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In <BxIKsp.Gt3@unx.sas.com> sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com writes:
> philosophy?  If you want to get a job as a "feminist philosopher" you
> not only have to teach "feminist issues", but you have to teach them
> in a certain *way*, from a certain point of view.  Any feminist
> philosophers out there who are Ayn Rand followers?  Any feminist

Oh, puh-leaze, Gary!  Do you know *ANYONE* who has gone on the job market as an
Ayn Rand specialist & gotten a job of *any* description in an academic
philosophy department?

------------------------
Ruth Ginzberg <rginzberg@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Philosophy Department;Wesleyan University;USA
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: holmes@garnet.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Organization: Boise State University
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 18:39:33 GMT

I am a realist myself, but I do not think that Truth is required in
order to search for truths.  This is fortunate, since it seems clear
that Truth (as an abstract object) does not exist.  Of course, the
iterative hierarchy of the usual set theory does not exist as an
abstract object either, and remains useful; I think that the status of
Truth is similar.


-- 
The opinions expressed		|     --Sincerely,
above are not the "official"	|     M. Randall Holmes
opinions of any person		|     Math. Dept., Boise State Univ.
or institution.			|     holmes@opal.idbsu.edu
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams)
Subject: Re: Rights
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 1992 21:28:11 GMT
Organization: Security APL, Inc.

In article <1992Oct30.021034.2101@panix.com> jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams)
>>I think rights are, first of all, social constructs (or institutions).  In
>>this, they are similar to Mondays.  What makes a particular day a Monday is
>>that, by consensus, people agree that it is a Monday.  There are rules for
>>deciding it, but those rules were created, not discovered.
>
>It would be silly for someone to ask himself "I know that in my society
>people say that October 26, 1992 is a Monday, but is it *really* a
>Monday?"  In your view, would it be equally silly to ask a similar
>question about rights?  It seems to me it would not, so our concept of
>rights is a concept of something that is not a social construct.

"Is there really a right to freedom of speech?" is easily confused with
"Should there be a right to freedom of speech?".  People often say the
former when, I think, they really mean the latter.  (Also, if I am correct
about the nature of rights, people are often mistaken about their nature,
and ask the first question when the latter would be more appropriate.)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Question for Ruth
From: RGINZBERG@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Ruth Ginzberg)
Date: 12 Nov 92 07:41:00 EDT
 <BxKAF7.JLw@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> <1992Nov11.150554.17351@husc3.harvard.edu>
Distribution: world
Organization: Philosophy Dept., Wesleyan University
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In <1992Nov11.150554.17351@husc3.harvard.edu> zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu writes:

> I would answer your question myself, but for my abject inability to
> come up with a charitable description of the putative subject.  Your

Would that be, perhaps, because you haven't actually READ any of the
literature?  I find that there are an enormous # of people who claim to know a
priori that the subject of feminist philosophy is worthy only of dismissal,
without ever having read anything in it, but relying only on the reports of
those who want to sack it.  This is not proper philosophical method.

> local academic bookstore is likely to have a sheaf of remaindered
> copies of a "feminist logic" tract by Andrea Nye.  Read it, and draw
> your own conclusions.

Have YOU read it?  I haven't.  I'm looking forward to it, but I haven't yet had
the time.  It only came out last spring, I think.  From the large amount of
net.discussion of her book, I imagine that either (1) It must be just about on
the NYT bestseller list, & she must be pulling in enormous royalties; or (2)
<*gasp*> there are an awfully lot of people talking about a book they haven't
read, who are speaking about it as though they HAD read it.

[Just for the record:  I get equally peeved at those who sneer at Ayn Rand
without having ever READ any of her work, as I do at those who sneer at Andrea
Nye (or Andrea Dworkin for that matter) without having read theirs.]

Lemme see:  reaching FAR back into the ancient recesses of my brain, back when
I used to know something about logic, it seems to me that I do not recall the
proof that the "Philosophical Sneer" can be incorporated into a system of rules
of inference without introducing the possibility of corrupting either
consistency or completeness of the system.

However, the "Philosophical Sneer" does seem somehow related to the
now-discredited "Proof By Intimidation" : a proof method usually identifiable
by the use of the term "obviously" or "clearly", followed by some statement
which is neither obvious nor clear, and which often does not follow from the
premises.


------------------------
Ruth Ginzberg <rginzberg@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Philosophy Department;Wesleyan University;USA
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Feminist Philosophy
From: RGINZBERG@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Ruth Ginzberg)
Date: 10 Nov 92 18:21:39 EDT
 <1992Nov8.204839.415@news.wesleyan.edu> <1992Nov09.220747.135547@Cookie.secapl.com>
Distribution: world
Organization: Philosophy Dept., Wesleyan University
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In <1992Nov09.220747.135547@Cookie.secapl.com> frank@Cookie.secapl.com writes:

> In article <1992Nov8.204839.415@news.wesleyan.edu> RGINZBERG@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Ruth Ginzberg) writes:
> >Now, as a professional philosopher whose specialty is feminist philosophy, let
> >me give the following advice:  To those who *think* they disagree with feminist
> >philosophy a priori:  why don't you follow your own philosophical method and
> >actually let us know what particular argument(s) you disagree with, and on what
> >basis (invalid inferences? false premises?).  BTW, it is only fair that you
[...]
> Let me make a counter-proposal: present to us *one* argument which
> specifically pertains to feminist philosophy.  Preferably one you agree
> with.  It is legitimate on the net to say "at this point this gets too
> complicated for net discussion; go to the literature"; but this is *not*
> legitimate as an opening salvo.

Would you like that to be one argument FORM or one argument's CONTENT?

If you want a unique argument FORM, see my "Rationality, Women's Reason and
Logic" in the APA NEWSLETTER ON FEMINISM AND PHILOSOPHY, Spring 1989.

If you want a unique argument w.r.t. CONTENT, may I suggest that you search
your local library's on-line card catalogue on the 2 keys FEMINIS* AND
PHILOSOPH*.  Then check out any of the entries which pop up, & enjoy.

------------------------
Ruth Ginzberg <rginzberg@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Philosophy Department;Wesleyan University;USA
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
	<TORKEL.92Nov5201116@echnaton.sics.se>
	<1992Nov5.205117.12672@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 21:50:53 GMT

In article <1992Nov5.205117.12672@klaava.Helsinki.FI> amnell@klaava.Helsinki.
FI (Marko Amnell) writes:

   >By the Law of Excluded Middle I mean any philosophical principle that
   >says that sentences of some language (formal system, natural language)
   >can only have the truth values "true" or "false".

  What does this mean? Mind, I am as fanatical a realist as ever walked
the surface of the earth, but this makes it no easier for me to understand
this talk about truth values. What does it mean for a sentence to have
a truth value, and what are the truth values "true" and "false"?
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle
Date: 5 Nov 92 19:11:16 GMT
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista

In article <1992Nov5.153919.27994@klaava.Helsinki.FI> amnell@klaava.Helsinki.
FI (Marko Amnell) writes:

   >What we see is
   >that if we maintain Excluded Middle, we are led to realism in
   >metaphysics and philosophy of mathematics (what one might call
   >`global realism')

  This sounds to me like a typical piece of Dummett babbling. What
is "Excluded Middle" supposed to mean here?
From: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle
Date: 9 Nov 92 18:54:26 GMT
Article-I.D.: unx.BxGpuq.3EC
Organization: SAS Institute Inc.
Originator: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com


In article <1992Nov9.123508.17250@husc3.harvard.edu>, zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:
|> 
|> MZ:
|> >>Am I hearing the term `proposition' from a self-professed extensionalist?
|> 
|> RH:
|> >"Proposition" means "sentence".
|> 
|> Certainly not to me, nor, I suspect, to the vast majority of
|> philosophers.  If you mean "sentence", then write `sentence'.

I agree with your sentiments, but I'm not at all sure that your
claim about the vast majority of philosophers.  Since at least
the medievals, philosophers have used 'proposition' (or 'propositio'?)
when they meant 'sentence'.  In the past when I have insisted on
the same distinction of usage I have been accused of pedantry --
something of which I am *never* guilty.
-- 
Gary H. Merrill  [Principal Systems Developer, C Compiler Development]
SAS Institute Inc. / SAS Campus Dr. / Cary, NC  27513 / (919) 677-8000
sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com ... !mcnc!sas!sasghm
From: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Date: 11 Nov 92 13:55:22 GMT
Organization: SAS Institute Inc.
Originator: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com


In article <1992Nov10.234703.4489@guinness.idbsu.edu>, holmes@garnet.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:
|> Consider the following sentence:
|> 
|> 	"Appended to its own quotation is not a true sentence of
|> English" appended to its own quotation is not a true sentence of
|> English.
|> 
|> Is this a true sentence of English?

Yes and no.  (Ha! Ha!)  This is a version of the Grelling-Nelson
paradox.  It can be made to fail in some semantically closed
systems.  In fact, in the system T* of my dissertation it fails
to be paradoxical.  However, this is at the expense of invalidating
certain interchange principles in quotation contexts that
otherwise seem to be reasonable.  I omit the details here.  It's
all pretty ugly and complex.
-- 
Gary H. Merrill  [Principal Systems Developer, C Compiler Development]
SAS Institute Inc. / SAS Campus Dr. / Cary, NC  27513 / (919) 677-8000
sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com ... !mcnc!sas!sasghm
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle
Originator: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 21:14:26 GMT
Organization: SAS Institute Inc.


In article <TORKEL.92Nov6191327@bast.sics.se>, torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen) writes:
|> In article <1992Nov6.171811.3695@klaava.Helsinki.FI> amnell@klaava.Helsinki.
|> FI (Marko Amnell) writes:
|> 
|>    >This is the point where the Law of Excluded Middle comes in.
|>    >It says that every possible proposition is true or false.
|> 
|>   That is, that it is true or is not true? As in your earlier formula,
|> "the conditions obtain or do not obtain"? But this is just what I am
|> asking about. What do you intend to assert here? How is this statement
|> different from "if the conditions obtain, then they obtain" or any other
|> statement that is usually regarded as a logical truth? Apparently you
|> attach some peculiar significance to this particular tautology, at least
|> when it is uttered in certain contexts, but your present remarks don't
|> explain what this signficance is.

I think the confusion results from Marko's failure to express what he
really means (or ought to mean?).  Marko keeps putting things in ways
that encourage Torkel to see a trivial tautology.  And when he responds
to Torkel's questions, he just ends up rephrasing his claims in
fundamentally the same way.

Certainly Marko wants to deny that a certain sentence (or sentential
form) *is* a tautology.  That sentence is

Syn:		P v ~P

This is the syntactic version of Excluded Middle.  The semantic
version is

Sem:	For every sentence x, either x is true or x is false.

And Syn expresses Sem (in the object language) via the interpretation
of '~'.

To begin, Marko wants to deny Sem and replace it with something like

Sem':	For every sentence x, either x is true (T) or x is false (F)
	or x is indeterminate (?).

Given the three truth-values we now have, we need to provide a new
semantics for our sentential operators.  One *may* provide such
a semantics that *still* makes Syn come out to be tautological (true
under every truth-value assignment.  But there are *other* semantics
that render Syn a non-tautology.  For example, (a common one)

		P | ~P		P | Q | P v Q
		__|___		__|___|_______
		T | F		T | T |   T
		F | T		T | F |   T
		? | ?		T | ? |   T
				F | T |   T
				F | F |   F
				F | ? |   ?
				? | T |   ?
				? | F |   ?
				? | ? |   ?

Of course, (P -> P) remains tautologous under the (common) semantics
that the conditional is false only when its antecedent is true and
its consequent false.  This certainly removes the equivalence of
"Either the conditions obtain or do not obtain" and "If the conditions
obtain, then they obtain" since if "the conditions obtain" has the
third value (?), the first of these is indeterminate while the second
is true.

As to what the metaphysical significance of all this may be, I will
not even speculate.











Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 08:55:33 GMT

In article <memo.744594@cix.compulink.co.uk> shaman@cix.compulink.co.uk 
(Leo Smith) writes:

   >Is this academic put-down game restricted to members of scandinavian
   >teaching establishments, or can anyone join in?

  Which Scandinavian teaching establishments are those?