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Monthly Archives: January 2024

Vagueness is Essential

10 Wednesday Jan 2024

Posted by nightingale108 in Questions in Logic

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

linguistics, logic, meaning, ontology, philosophy, semantics

Vagueness is not a matter of semantics. It is a problem that troubles the basic assertion that, as our old friend Berty Russell asserted as an axiom in the Principlia Mathematica, "Everything that is, is." The basics are a very interesting place to stay. We would like to say this is a basic and acceptable assertion, and it turns out to not be basic at all. In fact, no subject is elementary, and also every subject is elementary. 
 
Channell and Rowland argue that vagueness has pragmatic usefulness: "For language to be fully useful, therefore, in the sense of being able to describe all of human beings' experience, it must incorporate built-in flexibility. This flexibility resides, in part, in its capacity for vagueness" (p201 Channell 1994) Dr. Channell outlines various views of where vagueness comes from, from the difference between the "same idea" in different minds (Fodor 1977 in Channell 1994), to language (Peirce 1902 in Channell 1994), to physical reality (Russell 1923). Vagueness is found discussed in logic (Lakoff 1972 in Channell 1994) where it is argued (along with Russell) that "true" and "false" are vague, and so classical logic could be modified..." (p66 Nightingale 2019)

"[i]t is perfectly obvious, since colours form a continuum, that there are shades of colour concerning which we shall be in doubt whether to call them red or not, not because we are ignorant of the meaning of the word "red," but because it is a word the extent of whose application is essentially doubtful." (1923 Russell as quoted in Nightingale 2019, p66).

"The word "red" is vague in this respect because there are borderline cases where it is not clear whether or not we should call the case "red". Russell says "essentially doubtful" because this uncertainty is essential, in the sense of being a part of the nature of red. One deception here is in asserting that the "continuum" is a perfectly precise reality that can be expressed numerically. This renders vagueness a kind of error; without a perfectly known continuum underneath our words, vagueness is not error but has a reality of its own. Does the continuum suffer from vagueness?...
Peirce claimed that another way to describe generality is where the Law of Excluded Middle ("A or ~A is always true") does not hold. This makes sense because normally, the LEM decides which of "A or ~A" is true (even if we don't know which is decided, it asserts that "out there" it is decided.) When the LEM does not apply "A or ~A" is left undecided, which allows for a generalization on "A or ~A", you can choose which. However the claim that something can be essentially uncertain is directly against the LEM." (p66-68 Nightingale 2019)

I mean to say that reifying vagueness proves the LEM is false, in general. (The ideas of general and of vague are intimately connected) Russell asserted "everything that is, is" in order to "prove" the LEM. And here I am arguing against the LEM, which would also be against "everything that is, is" What makes red red? In this question i mean to be vague between term red and the actual red. If everything that is depends on other things to be, there is a certain spaciousness to Being, an undefined vagueness between Being and Space.

Feint

01 Monday Jan 2024

Posted by nightingale108 in Questions in Logic

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The shadows of my words grow longer under the setting sun, misspoken,
I stare into the mists of the northern laurel trees.
I wait for warriors to come.
Come, I call in my mind and heart,
Come.

Warriors with blue tattoos scream their battle cry,
and, look there—fighting limbs, heads down, running naked out of the mists.
Like a baby being born, they offer their bodies and their lives.

Emerging from the mists, their bellows make
the fog of war a tangible unknown.

“We will break you,” says the doctor to the baby
as he takes him away, giving the mother a sucker
and a dark waiting room.

They cut his foreskin, tattoo his body with the symbols of a warrior
who screams without shame, none knowing their meaning or power.

Running barefoot, long spears and wide shields,
great magic hums and sparks around him,
because the enemy has war machines.
The enemy doesn’t care for magic—
magic is given to reward virtue,
and virtue preserves the land and sky.
“The only sex that war machines know is rape,”
speaks the druid who knows magic is madness.

But the best part came when the Clockwork Empire
could not make it to the edge of the world: those babes,

brave, running with the chaos of the wind,
offering their bodies and their lives

to their mothers first, and then the northern winters,
and then to the biting and cutting armies
of undead Latin words,

their poetry woven into blue skin-tattoos,
stronger than armor and siege machines.

The Strength of Men was victorious then,
and it will be again.

Oh come,
let them come

naked into the mine fields,
their innocent minds never suspecting the bombs;
they will have only wide
shields and long spears. Warriors that die
find themselves running in green fields
with the sun caught high on their brow,
and if they live the mists will return them
to their brethren.
Against all odds they will win again.

And if they all die, we will all die with them
after a long rape.
There will be nothing left for the machines to ravage.

We will follow those warriors to their fields and a new sun,
whether we like it or not.

Those naked men will leave fertile fields
for us to till in peace.
Swiftly they disappear,
only to emerge from another mist against another enemy.

Their Will cannot be broken.

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