Re: Name the thesis: "Formal sentences capture informal ones"

tchow_at_lsa.umich.edu
Date: 02/01/05 

Date: 01 Feb 2005 20:21:44 GMT

In article <1107287450.529419.62350@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>,
 <Helene.Boucher@wanadoo.fr> wrote:
>> (1) reducing informal mathematics to informal logic*;
>> (2) expressing informal logic* by formal logic*.
[...]
>Not having thought about it more than the ten seconds of this reply, I
>would guesstiimate that (1) seems to do all the work, and (2) could
>turn out to be fairly trivial.

I'd agree that (2) is trivial compared to (1), but my point was not to
discuss logicism (someone else brought that up) or to compare (2) to (1),
but to point out that it is a common and unstated assumption that nothing
is lost during step (2). However, it is conceptually a critical step,
and I think a lot of confusion (among students/amateurs/beginners) is
generated when this assumption remains tacit rather than explicit. 

-- 
Tim Chow       tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth.  ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences

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