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Article 3629 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: dlyndes@gothamcity.jsc.nasa.gov (David Lyndes)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy,sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: Intelligence Testing
Message-ID: <1992Feb10.232000.23821@aio.jsc.nasa.gov>
Date: 10 Feb 1992 23:20:00 GMT
References: <12351@optima.cs.arizona.edu> <1992Feb5.204750.21898@midway.uchicago.edu> <1992Feb6.214010.14199@aio.jsc.nasa.gov> <1992Feb7.073841.8573@husc3.harvard.edu>
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[DL]
|> But the problem remains: namely
|>
|>(1) platonism explains mathematical ontology and truth quite nicely but
|>    fails to explain its utility and epistemology, while [...]

[Mikhail Zeleny, MZ] 
|> This is hardly a problem, provided that one is serious about the causal
|> role of the Forms.  Epistemology and pragmatics haunt half-baked Platonists
|> only; the truly insane among us find that there's nothing wrong with
|> anamnesis, let alone the erotic epistemology of the later Plato.

Quite so.  I have no arguments.  Only an uneasiness about causal relationships
with the forms.  As a side issue, since you seem to be the resident
platonist (or at least the most forthcomming), how might the form-matter
kind of causality be integrated with the rest of physics, and should
it be integrated?

[MZ]
|> Where in Bradley is this [the Bradley Regress] to be found? 

I never found it.  For what its worth, Wilfred Sellars told me that Bradley
never wrote the Bradley regress.  Spoken it maybe but never wrote it.
 
[DL]
|>    Question: What makes a predication true?
|>    Answer:   A relation (the copula) which holds between the subject and
|>              predicate.
|>    Question: Then what makes the copula relation hold, another relation?
|>              And that relation another?  And another? ...
|>

[MZ] 
|> Sounds like a bad case of explanatory rationalist jitters, flavored with a
|> dash of use-mention confusion.  Of course, the copula expresses the
|> relation between the subject and the predicate, rather than "makes it
|> true"; as for the latter, it's rather more reminiscent of the "Third man"
|> regress in Plato's "Parmenides", which can be quite easily avoided, e.g. by
|> abandoning the subject-predicate conception in a Fregean manner.  Now,
|> given the extensional view of functions, you wouldn't be quite as concerned
|> about the question of what's the irreducible relation between a function
|> and its argument, would you?

Nope! Not me!  But then, I'm not an extensionalist, even with regard to
functions.

The use-mention confusion is due to the poor and sloppy way I expressed it.
I'll try to do better next time.  Bradley (if he actually thought up the
regress) was a Hegelean.  But regardless of who invented the regress, it
was in the air c.1900 in Britain and used by the Hegeleans to harrass anyone
who might be atomistic.

[DL]
|> >    Wittgenstein's solution was that relations do not denote at all.  People
|> >    EXPRESS relations by relate-ING the names of the related objects.  We
|> >    can express the relation *is bigger than* by placing the words
|> >    "is bigger than" between the names of the smaller and larger objects.

[MZ]
|> Sounds like a regurgitated "Sinn und Bedeutung" doctrine.

I don't know where Wittgenstein got it; maybe it came from Sinn/Bedeutung.
But following the line this way places the emphasis in pragmatics, not syntax
or semantics.  Frege never needed to carry the analysis that far.  The
distinction had an intuitive plausability and solved the problems he was
considering. That was enough.
-- 
+-------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+
| David K. Lyndes                     | "In 50 years, if we're nice to them,  |
| Barrios Technology                  |  computers will keep us around as     |
| email: dlyndes@deltahp.jsc.nasa.gov |  pets." --anon.                       |
+-------------------------------------+---------------------------------------+
| The opinions expressed are not necessarily those of my employer nor of God. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+


