On Oct 12, 2008, at 6:49 AM, Rob Freeman wrote:
> ...
> Pat doesn't like the explosion of relations. He needs some other
> system of meaning to tell him which ones are meaningful:
>
> "Yes, these sets are all distinct. I don't know if they are distinct
> in "meaningful ways" because I don't know what you count as a
> 'meaningful way'."
>
> But Pat, nobody knows what to count as a "meaningful way". That is
> what is at issue. What right do we have to be throwing out all the
> combinatorial explosion of possible meaningful sets suggested by set
> theory? (01)
Well, rights have nothing to do with it. But there is in fact a
perfectly reasonable justification, one I just alluded to in another
post, namely, that the relations that get "thrown out" are precisely
the ones for which the notion of "meaningless" makes some sense — they
are the relations that it is impossible to express (given some
initial, at most countably infinite, set of primitives) in one's
language. What use do you envision for relations that are completely
beyond our conceptual grasp? Can you envision a single case where
this would be useful to ontological engineering? (02)
-chris (03)
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