Re: the need for relevance

On Jan 15, 4:25 pm, "Jesse F. Hughes" <je...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Han de Bruijn <Han.deBru...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

It's so full of contradictions that I can't even start to mention
them.  But ah!! You call these contradictions: "counter intuitive
results" ..

A contradiction is a theorem of the form "A & ~A".  If you can show
that ZFC proves such a theorem, then we would all agree that it is a
contradiction.

But maybe you mean something else by the term "contradiction".  Well,
it's a bit bad form to redefine a term that already comes with a
conventional meaning in the relevant context, but let's ignore that
for now.  Tell us: what do you mean when you use the term
"contradiction", as when you say "ZFC is so full of
contradictions..."?
**************************************************************8

For Mr. HdB, the (mathematical, to be sure) fact that there exists a
bijection between the set of natural numbers and the set of even
natural numbers, and thus BY DEFINITION both the set of natural
numbers and the set of even natural numbers have the same cardinality,
is a contradiction.

Why? Because HE KNOWS there are half as many even natural numbers as
there are natural numbers! How does he know that? Who cares! He's said
that anyone knows that, and thus it is so. Period.

Well, and what does this have to do with contradictions? The hell
knows, but HdB, from his non-mathematical point of view (one can't
blame him on this: he is not a mathematician, after all), has decided
the above bijection is one. Period.

Well, and even assuming all that: then what?! Nothing, but HdB thinks
that since mathematicians get money to do their maths, then they MUST
produce results that he and his friends can apply in what he has
decided is "the real world". Why does he thinks so? I don't know, but
this is one of the main points he has to attack, some times pretty
viciously, though usually pretty ridiculously and even in a very funny
way, mathematics and mathematicians.

So after all it is not, at all, about contradictions as we know them
from logics, with HdB, but about stuff that he can't really understand
and thus he calls it "a contradiction". Don't confuse!

Regards
Tonio
.

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