Quoting "John F Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>: (01)
> Unlike many Oxford philosophers, Rom has a well-balanced view of how
> logic relates to reality. For the record, two Oxfordians who have
> misguided views about the way logic is related to reality are
> Peter Strawson and Michael Dummet. (02)
Based on what I know of their work, my positive points also go to Rom
and negative points to Dummett. It seems that Dummett had the basic
marriage of point-continuum and set theory (PC) in his head, and he
mapped this to the world. This mapping is strange in the sense that it
brings no measurable benefit, but it brings a lot of unnecessary
conceptual harm. If PC could be erased from the minds of scientists,
there would be a lot less fruitless controversy in mapping logic to
reality. (03)
Sorry that I elaborate too much, but Dummett is a paradigm case.
Several of Dummett's works made me wonder why is he doing that, but
understanding that PC is his meta-mathematical or
mathematico-metaphysical view made me understand the reason behind the
confusion. For instance, presentism, the simplest view of time, can be
undermined by mapping PC to time. According to presentism, only the
present moment exists, the past moments did exist, and the future
moments will become to exist. This only requires the supposition that
the present is a positive period: it is actually indivisible but
mathematically divisible. In contrast, suppose that time consists of
points: (04)
“St Augustine considered that the present has no length: ‘For if it
were so extended, it would be divisible into past and future’
(Augustine p272-3). Dummett agrees: ‘The present has no duration: it
is a mere boundary point between the past and the future’ (Dummett
p74). So, far from the present being all that is real, it has shrunk
to a durationless point” (Rundle p91). (05)
"Like the enigma of time for Augustine, the enigma of the continuum
arises because language misleads us into applying to it a picture that
doesn’t fit. Set theory preserves the inappropriate picture of
something discontinuous, but makes statements about it that contradict
the picture under the impression that it is breaking with prejudices;
whereas what should really have been done is to point out that the
picture just doesn’t fit, that it certainly can’t be stretched without
being torn, and that instead of it one can use a new picture in
certain respects similar to the old one." (Wittgenstein p471) (06)
Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Grammar. Basil Blackwell, 1974.
St Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943.
Michael Dummett. The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. London: Duckworth, 1991.
Bede Rundle. Time, Space, and Metaphysics. Oxford University Press, 2009. (07)
-A (08)
> Following is an abstract of another talk by Rom H.
>
> John
> _____________________________________________________________________
>
> Why Brains Can?t Think: Exposing the Mereological Fallacy
> Rom Harré, Emeritus Fellow of Linacre College
> Monday 16th July, 7pm: Rewley House
>
> As the 21st Century opened, the discipline of 'academic psychology'
> seemed to be separating into two radically distinct and perhaps
> irreconcilable domains. Cultural/Discursive psychology focused on the
> discursive means for the management of meaning in a world of norms,
> while Neuropsychology focused on the investigation of brain processes
> loosely correlated with intuitively identified cognitive processes.
> These two domains can be reconciled in a hybrid science that brings them
> together into a synthesis more powerful than anything psychologists have
> achieved before.
>
> The marriage of Neuroscience and Cultural/Discursive psychology is based
> on the insights of many critics of the causal framework for psychology,
> but the most insightful has been one philosopher in particular, Ludwig
> Wittgenstein. Hybrid psychology depends on the intuition that while
> brains can be assimilated into the world of persons, as among the
> instruments people use for carrying out many of their projects, people
> cannot be assimilated into the world of cell structures and molecular
> processes. To suppose that they can be has been called the 'mereological
> fallacy' ? ascribing attributes of wholes to some of their parts. People
> think. Brains, parts of people?s bodies, do not.
>
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--
Avril Styrman
+358 40 7000 589 (010)
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