Dear John,
This is not a good argument: (01)
MW
> This means that you have to abandon the idea that a physical object is
> wholly present at each point in time, and accept that it is extended
> in time, and what you see at each point in time is the intersection of
> the whole life of the physical object with the point in time. (02)
JS: Nobody but a philosopher would talk that way.
[MW>] I might as well say that no one but a physicist or engineer would talk
about entropy and enthalpy, but if you have a heat transfer problem you had
better get familiar.
JS: And there are many philosophers who are highly skeptical about that kind
of talk.
[MW>] That is their stock in trade. (03)
MW
> In the paper Leo gave the reference to, the main basis for this
> distinction is dissectivity: is a part of the whole of the same type
> as the whole. (04)
JS: That is an extremely artificial distinction that would not occur to
anyone except a philosopher who is trying to force an artificial type system
upon the world.
[MW>] There is nothing artificial about dissectivity. It is just a property
of types to be either dissective or non-dissective (and I guess possibly
a-dissective). You might just as well say it is extremely artificial to say
that some relations are transitive. The consequence is the same.
Understanding that something has this property means there is an axiom you
can write that will help you with reasoning. (05)
WF
> The question for the engineer is, is it *useful* to make these
distinctions? (06)
Indeed. Scientists and engineers, who are very careful observers of the
world, don't talk that way.
[MW>] Interesting, I am an engineer, actually twice over (Chemical
Engineering and Computing) but I talk that way because I find it useful to
learn about and use the specialist language of an area when I stray onto
their territory. (07)
Regards (08)
Matthew West
http://www.matthew-west.org.uk
+44 750 338 5279 (09)
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