Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth

From: Lester Zick (lesterDELzick_at_worldnet.att.net)
Date: 10/29/04 

Date: Fri, 29 Oct 2004 14:54:41 GMT

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004 13:26:01 +0100, David Longley
<David@longley.demon.co.uk> in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:

>In article <KYlgd.329918$3l3.149384@attbi_s03>, patty
><pattyNO@SPAMicyberspace.net> writes
>>I don't buy logic as a standard of truth. Logic is just a mechanism.
>>Some people choose to use one mechanism, say FOPC ... others choose
>>other ones, like multi valued logics or intensional or non monotonic or
>>... the list goes on and on. The appropriate choices of logic depend
>>on the kinds of symbols and the contexts you are manipulating.
>
>You keep making these statements about the predicate calculus and I
>think it betrays a critical misunderstanding of the extensional stance
>(extensionalism). It is not a matter of "applying logic" (the predicate
>calculus) rather than something else. We know there are all sorts of
>(misguided in my view) folk about who have, since the 50s busied
>themselves trying to patch up intensional logic using all sorts of
>interesting band-aids such "rigid designators", "genuine names" etc
>(supposedly "true" in all possible worlds) These come close to being
>"critical" (transcendental) Kantian "regulative principles", which are
>synthetic apriori (modern cognitive science's denizens). Yet even Popper
>conceded though these might exist, they could not be apriori valid!.
>This is why I have talked of "intensional heuristics" yet you don't
>investigate *that* literature and appreciate just how descriptive it is
>of our folk psychology! Like many championing these logics you either
>fail to grasp or just lose sight of the whole point that extensional
>logic serves basically as a pragmatic tool in the scientist's linguistic
>repertoire for the clear expression of functional lawful relations which
>can be used (as "rule governed behaviour") to pragmatically
>(behaviourally) improve prediction and control of stimulation our own
>sensory surfaces. In this respect it's part of the web of our scientific
>belief, and it is so because that logic serves that enterprise so well.
>We just don't see the intensional logics contributing in the way that
>you and some of the others seem to think - as psychologists we study
>that almost as we do superstitious behaviour. I have attempted to show
>you why and so has Glen when we have introduced you to the way that
>those in the EAB investigate the control of behaviour by the three term
>contingency. The analyses of what is wrong with intensional contexts
>("mentalism") is that they are at best what we call hypothetical
>constructs which serve as no more than a modus vivendi within "the
>double standard" which is an inevitable feature of all research and
>development. We are not omniscient, hence all the illustrative examples
>of intensional or referential opacity. What you need to grasp, and
>perhaps help others to grasp is that Extensional expression suffices for
>scientific theory - and the arguments in it favour are explicative, not
>just proscriptive (against intensionalism). That is, it shows how and
>where the intensional (always "mental") leads us astray whilst the
>extensional stance enables us to improve our lot through better
>management. Sure, let folk try to see if they can break extensional
>logic, there's no proscription against that "testing", it's what science
>is all about, but that must not be done whilst denigrating what science
>itself is all about, without indulging in hopeless, anarchic
>self-contradiction. Doing the latter is not just subversive it borders
>on the delusional and that's exactly what we see from many posters here.
>They spend their time looking for evidence to *support* their
>preconceptions, and that's precisely how the psychotic differs from the
>scientist. The former deludes him/herself by piling up more and more of
>a delusional structure whilst the scientist assumes he is very probably
>wrong in the first place and looks for evidence to knock down his
>delusions. If they're left standing, all he can say is given his best
>efforts he can find no refuting evidence, but he and his colleagues will
>keep trying. The "psychotic" folk psychologist doesn't even look for
>such evidence and reactions with hostility to the very material which
>his conspecific, the "scientist" welcomes. That's how Glen, I and Wolf
>classify people here, and we do that because we know how science, mental
>life and pseudo-scientific "cognitive science (which includes much of
>"AI") work. What we don't know is how to predict and control behaviour
>*perfectly*, but that's inevitably an "unending quest".

Oh, crud! You just overflowed my predicate calculator, David.

Regards - Lester

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Tautologies and Empirical Truth
    ... (extensionalism). ... of our folk psychology! ... Like many championing these logics you either ... just proscriptive (against intensionalism). ...
    (sci.cognitive)
  • Re: Infinities and infinitesimals
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    (sci.math.research)
  • Re: Theistic Evolution
    ... methodological naturalism (which means that the possibility of TE is ... is doing nothing that conflicts with science. ... science without evidence is philosophy. ... like paraconsistent logics, where a statement can be true and false ...
    (talk.origins)
  • Re: Contradiction or paradox
    ... I asked who uses CBL besides you. ... What is the standard proof of FLT? ... Can you name any other users of an axiomatization of Computer Science? ... Computability Based Logics are used to formalize metamathematical ...
    (sci.logic)
  • Re: Contradiction or paradox
    ... unprovable sentences coincide with its refutable sentences, ... How would I know whether it was derived with CBL? ... You said it was a standard. ... standard for Computationally Based Logics". ...
    (sci.logic)