HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: coonstot@quads.uchicago.edu (charles orville onstott)
Subject: Martin Heidegger: Understanding and Meaning--a reading group
Summary: Reading group proposition
Keywords: Heidegger, meaning, understanding, interpretation, sign 
Reply-To: coonstot@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 1992 22:29:07 GMT

I am planning on doing a detailed re-reading of Division 1 Section V
of Martin Heidegger's _Being and Time_.	 This chapter deals with
the concept of "Being-In."  I am most concerned, however, with the
concepts of _meaning_, _understanding_, _interpretation_, and _sign_.
Therefore, I plan to do a reading to recover these concepts and
their associated ramifications.	 I am not closed to the possibility
that this could turn out to be a criticism.

  If anyone is interested in this sort of a study, I propose an
email reading group which I will proctor.    The readings will
be designed so that most of Section V will be covered by the end of
November.  Thus, the reading will be  a little demanding.  However,
we will not be reading all of Section V, only those that are relevent
to the purpose stated above.

  Whether or not you have read Heidegger, if you would be interested
in learning Heidegger's criticism of hermeneutics and reference theory
as presented in _Being and Time_, this reading would be very useful
to you.	 This could give you an introduction to a great thinker on these
matters--and one that presents several challenges to our current
understanding of these given concepts.	The application of his
criticism ranges anywhere from Artificial Intelligence, the Human
Sciences, to Hermenuetics.

The format:  Readings will be conducted on a weekly basis with
a posting of commentary on the reading at the end of the week by
all members.  These will be forwarded to all members of the group.
Commentary on the responses should be made at will and will be
forwarded to all those involved.  At the end of November, a commentary
on the group's movement of thought on Heidegger will be made by myself
and will be open to response through December.	It may take us
1 week into December to finish the relevent sections before the
final phenomenological study of the group's thought.

If you are interested, please send me email and I will send
out the first reading set.  You will need to have your own
copy of _Being and Time_(any library should have at least 1 copy)
I will be using the english translation of this text; however,
if you know German and have a copy of _Sein und Zeit_ your
input would be valuable.

Thank You,

Charles O. Onstott, III
University of Chicago Divinity School
coonstot@midway.uchicago.edu


-- 
Charles O. Onstott, III                         (coonstot@midway.uchicago.edu)
Graduate Student in Religion and the Human Sciences
The University of Chicago Divinity School
           "For [the study of] history, too, has its fashions."  (Anouilh)
Xref: sparky sci.philosophy.meta:2528 sci.logic:2000
From: mantha@pan.Berkeley.EDU (Surya Mantha)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta,sci.logic
Subject: Re: Question for Ruth
Date: 11 Nov 92 21:16:44 GMT
Reply-To: mantha@pan.Berkeley.EDU (Surya Mantha)
Organization: Xerox

|>In article <BxKAF7.JLw@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> 
|>jwales@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (jimmy donal wales) writes:
|>>it from other logic?  Is there a distinction 'feminine/masculine'
|>>along the lines of 'modal/deontic'?

	What is this distinction between modal and deontic logic
to which you are referring?

Thanks in advance,

regards
Surya Mantha
From: amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Date: 10 Nov 92 10:14:09 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

In <1992Nov09.200615.128772@Cookie.secapl.com> frank@Cookie.secapl.com 
(Frank Adams) writes:

>>Can you not even _imagine_ what it would be like for
>>there to be a collection of all true propositions about the world?
>>Suppose eg. that there is an omniscient being, would it not know all
>>true propositions?  Apparently so, and this means that you are saying
>>that the very notion of omniscience is confused.  I disagree.  I think
>>I can conceive what an omniscient being would be like.  Just imagine
>>a succesion of larger and larger computers, with the limit as the
>>series approaches an infinitely large memory.  What is confused about
>>this idea?

>But, unless you place the computer *outside* the world, the world
>itself keeps getting larger and larger as the computer does.  So the
>computer never gets to omniscience.

>It is not at all clear that it is sensible to talk about something
>existing outside the world.

It's not clear, but neither is it inconceivable.  One could try to
imagine what the world would look like from the outside.  This idea
is no more bizarre than eg. the idea of a self-membered set, which
is also in conflict with our common sense intuitions.  There are
lots of ideas that are counter-intuitive.  Think of the first time
you heard about time dilation, for instance.  God might know all
truths, including all truths about himself; if this were possible,
it would eliminate the difficulty you cite.

Alternatively, one could settle for near-omniscience.  I was only
trying to show that one could try to imagine what a collection of
all truths would be like in the real world.  There is no need to
cling to the computer metaphor--it was only an illustration.

-- 
Marko Amnell
amnell@klaava.helsinki.fi
Graduate Student in Philosophy
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: gar@cltr.uq.oz.au (Greg Restall)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Organization: Centre for Language Teaching and Research, Uni of Queensland, AUSTRALIA.
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 22:02:09 GMT

holmes@garnet.idbsu.edu (Randall Holmes) writes:

*It is possible to reason quite precisely about the iterative hierarchy
*(the Absolute Infinite), and, similarly, it is possible to reason
*about the Truth.  But one can only refer to it indirectly.

Isn't this self-refuting?

The use of proper names such as "the Absolute Infinite",
"the Truth" and forms such as "it" seem to indicate
that a rather direct means of reference is in use.

I wonder what this phrase looks like when translated
into something that doesn't refer to the Truth directly.
Does anyone wish to make a stab?

The odd nature of this reminds me of the last sentence in 
a manuscript by Graham Priest that I've just been reading.

	Whereof we cannot speak, thereof 
	we have just contradicted ourselves.

with due apologies to L.W.

Best wishes,

Greg Restall


--
------------------+------------------------------------------------
Greg Restall      | Philosophy Department, University of Queensland
gar@cltr.uq.oz.au | Queensland, 4072  Australia.
------------------+------------------------------------------------
Redemption rips through the surface of time in the cry of a tiny babe.
        - Bruce Cockburn, from the album "Nothing but a Burning Light"
From: amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle
Date: 6 Nov 92 14:27:41 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

In article <TORKEL.92Nov6130430@isis.sics.se> torkel@sics.se 
(Torkel Franzen) writes:

>  To amplify this, suppose you try to explain to me what you mean by
>the statement "every possible state of affairs obtains or does not
>obtain". Clearly you are using the tautology here in some special
>way.

But, in what way is this phrase a tautology?  That is what I'm asking.
Is it just an empty locution (as you seem to think) or is it a law
of thought (as Aristotle thought)?  I don't really have an opinion on
the status of such tautologies.  I'm curious, and as long as my
curiosity lasts, I'll stick with philosophy.  I really can't
answer your question beyond this.

-- 
Marko Amnell
amnell@klaava.helsinki.fi
Graduate Student in Philosophy
From: jwales@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (jimmy donal wales)
Subject: Re: Plato's Views on Women
Organization: Indiana University
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 16:56:59 GMT

Ruth Ginzberg writes:
>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?

Tibor Machan, Douglas Rasmussen, Douglas Den Uyl, Leonard Peikoff, 
Harry Binswanger, David Kelley, Stephen Hicks.

The first 3 are 'neo-Objectivists' at Auburn University (visiting
West Point), St. Johns, and (somewhere, I forget), respectively.

The second 2 are affiliated with the Ayn Rand Institute and have
held academic jobs.  Binswanger's PhD is from Columbia.

David Kelley is founder of the Institute for Objectivist Studies,
PhD from Princeton.

Stephen Hicks is a young upstart, just graduated from Indiana University.
Was at Trenton State, I think, and now at... I forget.

There are many more, but I think you get the point.

--Jimbo

Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com (Gary Merrill)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Originator: sasghm@theseus.unx.sas.com
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 14:06:30 GMT
Organization: SAS Institute Inc.


In article <1992Nov9.095624.9741@klaava.Helsinki.FI>, amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell) writes:

|> OK.  Hintikka's logic avoids the Strengthened Liar Paradox, and hence
|> also Randall's modified Tarski Paradox, in the thoroughly uninteresting
|> way that these sentences cannot be formalized in the system IF.  This
|> is because the sentence "This sentence is not true" contains contradictory
|> negation.  In IF contradictory negation can only occur at the beginning
|> of a sentence, not inside it.  Here's what Hintikka says:
	[ quote omitted ]
|> So, it is the expressive limitations of IF which allows Hintikka to avoid
|> these kinds of paradoxes. (Incidentally, the deduction theorem does fail
|> in IF, as Merrill suggested).

This is symptomatic of all of these multi-valued approaches.  You end
up with a formal system in which (at least some of) the pardoxes can
be escaped.  But the manner of the escape is unsatisfying ("Oh, golly,
I can't seem to formulate the paradox!").  The result is that you
end up playing a kind of game with formal systems that has no real
value (aside from expanding your publications list) because the
systems you construct have ad hoc features designed purely to escape
a set of paradoxes and the resulting logic is grossly non-standard
and counterintuitive.  When you contrast these approaches to that
of Tarski, it's real hard to make a case that you have accomplished
anything.
-- 
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: frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Date: Mon, 09 Nov 1992 20:06:15 GMT
Organization: Security APL, Inc.

In article <1992Nov8.034010.25414@klaava.Helsinki.FI> amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell) writes:
>To say that something is _confused_ is to assert something like that there
>is no clear and distinct idea associated with the locution.  Why is this
>phrase confused?  Can you not even _imagine_ what it would be like for
>there to be a collection of all true propositions about the world?
>Suppose eg. that there is an omniscient being, would it not know all
>true propositions?  Apparently so, and this means that you are saying
>that the very notion of omniscience is confused.  I disagree.  I think
>I can conceive what an omniscient being would be like.  Just imagine
>a succesion of larger and larger computers, with the limit as the
>series approaches an infinitely large memory.  What is confused about
>this idea?

But, unless you place the computer *outside* the world, the world
itself keeps getting larger and larger as the computer does.  So the
computer never gets to omniscience.

It is not at all clear that it is sensible to talk about something
existing outside the world.
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle
Date: 6 Nov 92 22:19:42 GMT
	<TORKEL.92Nov6191327@bast.sics.se>
	<1992Nov6.193812.6196@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista

In article <1992Nov6.193812.6196@klaava.Helsinki.FI> amnell@klaava.Helsinki.
FI (Marko Amnell) writes:

   >But, I don't think I have a fatalistic view of events, if you mean by
   >this some kind of determinism.

  I was merely giving another example of a (natural) use of
tautologies to express metaphysical views. In this case, though, few
people take the view that the "law of the repeated antecedent" - i.e.
the tautology "if A then A" - stands or falls with philosophical
fatalism.
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Date: 6 Nov 92 23:45:55 GMT
	<1992Nov5.203945.12450@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
	<TORKEL.92Nov5224750@lludd.sics.se>
	<1992Nov6.183330.16549@guinness.idbsu.edu>
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista

In article <1992Nov6.183330.16549@guinness.idbsu.edu> holmes@garnet.idbsu.edu 
(Randall Holmes) writes:

   >Realism is a technical term meaning "maintaining the reality of
   >universals".

  This is not the sense of "realism" Amnell intended.
From: amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Excluded Middle
Date: 5 Nov 92 15:39:19 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

Reading Hintikka's article "Defining Truth, the Whole Truth and
Nothing but the Truth" today I was struck by the surprising role
of _tertium non datur_ in the problem of defining truth inside
a logic.  It seems that if one drops the Law of Excluded Middle
as a principle in the construction of logic, it becomes _possible_
to build a logic in which the set of all true sentences can be
defined.  Gabriel Sandu claims to show this rigorously in a new
paper "IF first-order logic and truth-definition".

What I wish to ask you all is your general opinion about the 
_metaphysical_ status of the Law of Excluded Middle.  Reading
Hintikka's article, I was struck by the dissimilarity of the
role of this principle in the problem of Truth, when compared
with its role in the metaphysical problem of Reality or
Existence.

In _The Logical Basis of Metaphysics_ Michael Dummett attempts to
show that if one accepts _tertium non datur_ then the realist
approach to physial objects and the existence of mathematical
objects is supported. (This is an over-simplification, but bear
with me, I have a point)  This suggested to me that if the Law
of Excluded Middle supported Realism, then it would also be
on the side of the existence of a set of all truths.

But Hintikka shows that this is manifestly false.  Klaus Grue's
work in CS also supports the same conclusion.  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') but when it comes to examining the problem
of the definition of truth in logic, and the metaphysical
problem of whether there is or is not a set of class of any other
kind of collection of all truths _in the real world_ (and distinguished
from within a formal system) maintaining Excluded Middle has
a conclusion that seems antithetical to the aims or beliefs of the
realist.

I find this to be a deep result.  As Von Wright would put it, the
status of this one principle is a clue about more profound things
in philosophy at large.  I am quite surprised at the starkness of
the contrast in the consequences of dropping or maintaining 
Excluded Middle in these two groups of philosophical problems:
those surrouding truth and the whole truth, and those surrounding
existence and the nature of the being of various kinds of
objects -- sets, chairs, persons.

I'm probably rambling a bit here.  But, in any case, what do you
think about the Law of Excluded Middle?  Is it valid in all cases?
Why?  How would one justify dropping it?  How does one decide
in cases like this which philosophical principle to maintain and
which to drop?

-- 
Marko Amnell
amnell@klaava.helsinki.fi
Graduate Student in Philosophy
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: torkel@sics.se (Torkel Franzen)
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Organization: Swedish Institute of Computer Science, Kista
	<1992Nov10.210758.11481@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 08:43:44 GMT

In article <1992Nov10.210758.11481@klaava.Helsinki.FI> amnell@klaava.
Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell) writes:

   >But, you're the one who picked this example from natural language, to
   >which my lame argument was a response.

  In other words, you don't in fact want to claim that "the set of
true English sentences" is well-defined? In that case I revert to
my earlier question: how do you propose to explain what you are
referring to in your speculations about the "totality of true
propositions"?


Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
From: tucker@mitre.org (William Tucker)
Subject: Re: Question for Ruth
Keywords: Re: Question for Ruth 
Organization: The MITRE Corporation, McLean, VA, USA
Date: Thu, 12 Nov 1992 23:18:09 GMT

You Ruth Ginzberg <rginzberg@eagle.wesleyan.edu> wrote:

 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


I (William Tucker):
 
Enjoyed reading it. It's easy to forget, thanks for the humour within
it too.


Wm T.

.standard disclaimer
From: amnell@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Marko Amnell)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Excluded Middle (Long)
Date: 9 Nov 92 20:13:00 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

In article <TORKEL.92Nov9140517@isis.sics.se> torkel@sics.se 
(Torkel Franzen) writes:

>In article <1992Nov8.134539.7879@klaava.Helsinki.FI> amnell@klaava.Helsinki.
>FI (Marko Amnell) writes:
>
>   >If we wish to introduce the notion of propositions as distinct from both
>   >sentences and statements, then what it added is this:  The true statement
>   >about the contingent state of affairs in its human context picks out one
>   >of an infinity of timeless abstract objects called propositions.
>
>  That's all well and good, but it doesn't answer my question whether
>"the totality of true propositions" is a notion better defined than
>"the totality of true sentences in all possible languages". If it is
>not, questions and speculations about the supposed totality are so
>much hot air. If it is, this remains to be shown.

The status of propositions is problematical in that it is not at all
clear in what sense a statement _expresses_ a proposition.  This is
in addition, of course, to all the usual problems with abstract objects.
This suggests that one should try to stick to sentences in human
languages when it comes to formulating eg. truth-definitions--Quine eg.
takes this approach in his latest effort.  But it is also true that
metaphysics looks aesthetically simpler with propositions rather than
messy sentences in natural language.  This can be seen in eg. the
`crystalline clarity' of the Tractatus picture (as you note below).

>  In metaphysics we can postulate all sorts of things, but we cannot
>postulate that we are making good sense. You may postulate that there
>is, corresponding to the sentence "this is a banana" uttered in a
>certain context, a timeless abstract object, the proposition that this
>is a banana. And so on. This postulate, however, is useless when we
>try to make sense of the locution "the totality of true propositions",
>in the absence of any explanation of which sentences, in which
>languages, real or hypothetical, have corresponding propositions, and
>how those sentences themselves are to be understood.

Would you be happier with "the totality of all possible sentences
(in all possible (or actual?) languages)" then?  Maybe one could base
a metaphysics on such an ontology, following Quine.

>  Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus, did not fall into this kind of loose
>babbling about a "totality of true propositions" since he explicitly
>postulated a particular formal ontology and a corresponding purely
>truth-functional language.  Of course, he paid a price for this: the
>relation between that ontology and language and our ordinary ontology
>and language was obscure in the extreme.

-- 
Marko Amnell
amnell@klaava.helsinki.fi
Graduate Student in Philosophy
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology,alt.books.reviews
From: mporter@nyx.cs.du.edu (Mitchell Porter)
Subject: Anthropologists' Theory of Everything - was Re: [GEN] Recent
  anthropologic collections 
Organization: University of Denver, Dept. of Math & Comp. Sci.
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 92 03:11:39 GMT

claird@NeoSoft.com (Cameron Laird) writes:
  [recommended books deleted]
>?  I assume the latter is the saltational-socialist contribution
>to the Theory of Everything skirmishes--note that I write this
>affectionately; I *like* such attempts at synthetic tradition as
>silverbacks Dennett, Edelman, Diamond, Prochiantz, MacNeish, Wil-
>son, ... have more or less recently given us.
>-- 
Can anyone tell me, a non-anthropologist, more about this? It seems to be
a reference to (a plethora of recent) attempts to create an
"anthropological Theory of Everything", or "Theory of Everything Human".
Xref: sparky sci.anthropology:1327 sci.archaeology:2721
From: genie@soda.berkeley.edu (Jeannie Yang)
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology,sci.archaeology
Subject: grad school and other stuff
Date: 6 Nov 1992 00:49:10 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley, CS Undergraduate Association
Distribution: usa
NNTP-Posting-Host: soda.berkeley.edu



	Hi guys, it's me again.  I'm the junior majoring in anthropology
in UC Berkeley who asked for suggestions about grad school in historical 
archaeology earlier, and I've gotten a few responses.  Among the choices 
are U. Va, U of South Carolina, Boston U, Columbia U, U of Florida, 
and U of Maryland.  My professor (James Deetz) also suggested Sonoma State 
here in California, where two of his students just got hired two years ago.  
I'd like to mention that I'm very interested in English colonial archaeology,
which I did not put down in my last post.  Since there are many 
archaeologists reading this newsgroup, it would be nice if you could tell 
me how you feel about the schools suggested above, contract work, and also, 
what the job market is like for CRM work, since I think that's what I'll 
end up doing after I get the MA degree.  I'd really appreciate any help 
I can get, and I'll post the results on here so those who are interested 
can know about it too.  Thanks!  

-- 
					|      "An archaeologist will date
	    Jeannie Yang  <:0)		|  any old thing."
	genie@soda.berkeley.edu		|                 ---a bumper sticker
    Department of Anthropology, UCB	|           spotted by Dr. Meg Conkey
Newsgroups: sci.anthropology