From: ramsay@unixg.ubc.ca (Keith Ramsay)
Subject: Re: Report on Philosophies of Physicists
Organization: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Date: Sat, 5 Sep 1992 05:03:16 GMT

In article <5399@dove.nist.gov> gilligan@bldrdoc.gov 
(Jonathan M. Gilligan) writes:
>I think that a lot of people are being too hard on Mitsu. 

I agree, although Mitsu hasn't given us enough to go on yet for us to
know whether he knows what he(?) is talking about, so I won't try to
vouch for that.

Here is one question which was posed to him:

Barry Merriman wrote:
>The above is all at the most metaphorical level. Is there any situation
>in the experience of the Eastern philosophers in which boolean logic 
>was strictly violated? (I.e. a situation precise enough to be
>cast into predicate logic, in which the logical operators did
>not work properly). I think not.

I will take a stab at answering this. There are western logicians who
have produced arguments against the universal applicability of boolean
logic, giving, indeed, examples in which they claim it is "not valid".
Here is one.

Consider the constructivist approach to mathematics. Under it, to say
"A or not A" implies that we have a method which will either yield a
derivation of A, or a demonstration that A leads to a contradiction.
Certainly under such an interpretation, we can't reasonably assert the
universal validity of "A or not A", without stretching the usual
meaning of the term "method".

There are, by the way, other problematic instances of boolean logic.
Under one common definition of "implies", "either A implies B or B
implies A" holds in boolean logic. This to many people's minds does not
accord with the standard meanin of "implies".

The biggest difficulty lies in the fact that we haven't specified very
well what it means to say "boolean logic is violated". We haven't
specified the meanings of the terms at all. How, in the first place,
does one specify the meanings of the terms of boolean logic? Without
using them in a circular way? Or determine whether it is a sound basis
on which to build a philosophy of language?

At this point in the discussion there are a number of objections and
counter-objections which can be made, many of which simply lead in
circles. To get anywhere is a tricky business. You have to develop
some idea of what the logical connectives mean, and how we can know
things about them. If you want a prolonged discussion of this (not all
of which I agree with, of course), you can try looking at a book like
Dummett's _The_Logical_Basis_of_Metaphysics_. Or, more easily, you can
just admit that the issue may be a bit thornier than you thought.
That's all I am arguing for, here.

Mitsuharu Hadeishi replied, in part:
>         It is very difficult to answer your question briefly,

Kim Gunnar St|vring yhus writes:
>(in other words, you don't know the answer.)

I suspect this assessment to be quite premature.

Mitsuharu Hadeishi continued...
> the lines of "what does it mean to make a statement about something?",
> "what is the relationship between a model and the thing modelled?",
> "what is the nature of the subject-object relationship?", and so forth.
> These are questions of basic epistemology, in which the Eastern
> schools of philosophy make very different basic assumptions about
> how one goes about understanding these issues than are made in
> Western logical positivist schools, particularly those that use
> Boolean logic as their basis.

I have only read a little bit about the subject, but I find this
description to be correct. (I won't claim that the "very different"
assumptions are accurate.) I read part of one interesting book which
compared the work of certain eastern logicians with Quine. (I can find
the reference if you like, when the UBC library re-opens after the
weekend holiday.)  Quine, if you are familiar with him, espouses what
is to many people's minds a fairly radical view of the nature of
language and reality. Quine aficionados claim that he succeeded in
refuting the logical positivists. He did, at least, manage to shake
them up a bit.

The (eastern) logicians discussed apparently had (well before Quine)
already gone much further in denying what is to us the obvious,
common sense idea of language as a mirror of reality.

It really shouldn't come as so much of a shock, though; in the West
we've already seen such views as the idea that material objects do not
exist apart from people, that they are merely convenient ways for us
to organize sense-data. Views of this kind, *if* one accepts them,
would certainly have an effect on one's stance toward quantum
mechanics. For some, the wave-function is a mere device for organizing
our experiences. Among those, some think there might be some point to
trying to produce a more "realist" theory, one which describes what is
"really going on", but for others, there is no further "reality" to be
"described" once one has a theory which allows us to compute the
observed results.

It seems quite often that people holding one or the other of the
possible views on these questions to regard the alternatives as simply
goofy and contemptible even.

SCOTT I CHASE:
|This has got to win the award for the most arrogant post ever to
|appear on sci.physics.  Mitsu, that was not easy to do, but you have
|managed it anyway.

I must disagree. I have seen far more arrogant postings on
sci.physics.

|You are speaking to probably the brightest group
|of people you will ever have the good fortune to deal with.  If you
|can't explain it to them, then you are probably a complete
|incompetent.  

I have had the good fortune of dealing, at times, with rather
intelligent groups of people (mean intelligence greater than this
group, or my own). But I rarely have heard this intelligence
advertised in such a way.

I've heard people from the humanities' end of the science/humanities
spectrum often complain that people in the sciences assume that (being
intelligent) they should be able quickly to grasp the nature of
questions in the humanities (in spite of the fact that it seems the
converse doesn't hold). "If you can't explain it without a lot of
effort, it must be bullshit", in effect. I do agree that the
accessibility of both the sciences and humanities is often underrated,
sometimes for the purposes of maintaining a "mystique", but I think
the humanists' complaint has some substance to it. I have witnessed
this sort of glibness, on the part of scientists, often enough, when
the two meet.

I recommend to people who want to learn about a field, whatever the
field might be, to develop a sense of tolerance and patience about it.
Be prepared to look at some references, and learn a bit about what has
been done already. I think we all know here that if you really want to
understand physics, you have to put some time and effort into it. The
same goes for anything else serious.

|Since your language skills demonstrate that you have a
|brain, I am forced to conclude that rather than incompetent, you are
|just a self-absorbed fool.

That is not a nice thing to say.

                       "In no way, shape or form did Kevin represent
Keith Ramsay            a viable alternative to mental illness."
ramsay@unixg.ubc.ca                  -Phillip K. Dick, _VALIS_