Re: syllogism

From: Wolf Kirchmeir (wwolfkir_at_sympatico.ca)
Date: 10/01/04 

Date: Fri, 01 Oct 2004 09:34:57 -0400

patty wrote:

[...]>
>
> Right, you are talking about material implication and material
> equivalence of *propositions*. Guess what? ... i was talking about
> identity of *objects*. You started out talking about what you called
> "logical identity" and then went on to talk (using the same symbols)
> about "an observable event", which i took as a logical object and not a
> proposition, which of course is not observable. I think that the
> identity of objects and the equivalence of propositions are quite
> different things. You correctly quoted the definition of the latter, i
> the definition of the former. It's a good thing we don't have to
> reason together, huh?

An observable event is asserted in a statement. We can't IMO talk
sensibly about idenity of objects - a thing is what it is and it ain't
anything else. It's perhaps significant that some things can not be
distinguished, eg, photons, etc, a conundrun in itself. (But NB that two
photons can't be the same location at the same time, so you can at least
tell that there are two of them.) I don't pretend to have any
ontological understanding of what that means. Richard Feynmann IIRC was
one of several physicists who proposed that there is really only one
photon (and electron, etc), and that what we observe as multiple photons
are in fact the intersections of that photon with our space-time. H'm.
Feynmann had a dry and sly sense of humour. Lovely mind. Nice premise
for an SF story, though. :-)

> <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=Zfj6d.5698%24tT2.761154%40news20.bellglobal.com>
>
>
>> Whether it makes sense to say that A, B have the same properties in
>> this case I'll leave to other thinkers.
>
>
> Well it doesn't make sense to me to say even that propositions have
> properties - nor would that have been anything that you got from me.

Well, I don't think they do, that's why it's a surprise whenever we can
prove that A == B. Now that I've arrived at this conclusion, I think
"identity" is a misleading term, too. It was co-opted in the early days
of formal logic, so we're stuck with it.

>> I'm getting leery of the term "property."
>>
>
> Don't take my use of "property" too seriously here ... by "Fa" i just
> mean that "F" is a proposition about an object "a" ... (Skinny-woman,
> Big-man, etc) pretty standard FOPL i should imagine.

> In any case, all i was trying to get around to was the relationship
> between some of the laws of logic specified in the diagram below ...
> what a round about way to do it .. huh?
>
> <http://icyberspace.net/patty/diagrams/logic-laws.jpg>

Haven't checked it out yet.

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