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Where are questions, a universal part of language, in logic?

Excerp of “A Defense of Poetry Against the Mathematicians” (in French)

29 Tuesday Oct 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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La contribution : Différents types de distinction

Peirce a défini l’imprécision en termes de loi de non- contradiction, qui est un exercice d’application de l’opération de négation classique : ~~P → P. Peirce dit que nous sommes dans une situation vague lorsque cette loi n’est pas vraie : ~~P → P. (Peirce 1960, 505). La loi de non- contradiction peut prendre différentes formes. La forme moderne, celle utilisée dans la preuve par contradiction, est ~~P → P. Le pluralisme est possible lorsque “pas-pas-P” ne signifie pas “P”, mais plutôt un type distinct de “pas-P”, ou une manière différente de nier P. Par exemple, la plupart des personnes soucieuses d’éviter l’imprécision peuvent facilement convenir qu’une étoile à neutrons est différente d’une question d’une manière différente de celle dont un citron est différent d’u n citron vert. Cependant, le fait d’accepter des types distincts de distinctions (appelons ces distinctions “A”) fait échouer la loi de non-contradiction et place les personnes qui tentent d’éviter l’imprécision dans un territoire vague.

On peut dire que le fait d’avoir différentes façons de nier P n’indique pas une indistinction, mais une plus grande distinction. Cela dépend de la façon dont nous utilisons le mot “distinction”. Tout d’abord, avec l’idée d’une “plus grande distinction”, nous avons déjà déplacé notre utilisation de la simple distinction vers une idée non définie de degrés de distinction, ce qui implique une imprécision dans notre utilisation de la distinction. De plus, supposons qu’il existe des distinctions de type A entre la même chose – par exemple, un triangle isocèle droit avec deux côtés égaux mesurant 1 cm (appelé triangle x) et un carré avec des côtés de 1 cm (appelé y). x et y sont différents en ce sens que l’un a 3 côtés et l’autre 4. Ils sont également différents en ce sens que x est un triangle et que y est deux triangles x mis ensemble. Se contenter de dire que le triangle et le carré sont distincts revient à rester vague sur la manière dont ils sont distincts. L’argument avancé ici est que c’est exactement ce que nous faisons et que, pour cette raison, la distinction est indistincte/floue. Nous ne sommes pas précis quant à nos types de distinctions.

Il existe de nombreuses tentatives pour résoudre le problème de l’imprécision. L’une d’entre elles consiste à soutenir que nous pourrions trouver toutes les précisions d’un usage vague donné du mot distinction, et que cela ne fait aucune différence si nous utilisons la distinction pour toutes ces distinctions par souci d’économie. Supposons par exemple que nous voulions savoir exactement où se trouve le bout de mon nez (c’est un exemple courant du problème de l’imprécision). Nous voulons être très précis sur toutes les parties de la ligne qui distinguent mon nez de l’air et nous grossissons donc. Malheureusement, ce grossissement rend la ligne de plus en plus difficile à décrire et, finalement, nous entrons dans la physique quantique et ne pouvons plus trouver la ligne. L’imprécision de la distinction est comme toute autre imprécision, elle ne peut être résolue par une plus grande précision. En cherchant toutes les distinctions entre les distinctions, nous ne sommes plus sûrs qu’il s’agisse bien de distinctions (voir la section “Sur l’imprécision” ci-dessous). Cependant, nous pouvons être sûrs de certaines distinctions entre les distinctions (comme dans la distinction “A” ci-dessus).

Il existe différentes façons de préciser l’opération de négation. La négation ou la distinction n’est pas universelle, mais la négation logique classique tente d’être universelle, et la caractéristique déterminante de la négation logique classique est que ~~P implique P. La seule façon dont cela peut être vrai est qu’il n’y a qu’un seul type d’opération de négation, et qu’elle est universelle/absolue. Si le premier “~” dans “~~P” signifie une chose et que le second “~” en signifie une autre, nous ne savons pas si nous avons P ou un autre type de “~P”. Wittgenstein (1976, p. 80) a déjà soutenu qu’il existe d’autres façons d’utiliser la négation logique. Dans son exemple, en effet, une deuxième négation en plus de la première ne fait rien d’autre que d’ajouter de l’emphase à une négation unique. Il est proposé ici qu’une double négation puisse avoir de nombreuses significations logiques au-delà de la simple mise en évidence, et au-delà de l’inversion totale de la négation logique classique. Les différences réelles entre les différences, ou les opérations de négation logique, observées ici sont amenées à leur conclusion naturelle : le concept de différence est vague.

zephyr

24 Thursday Oct 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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Tags

chess, romance

My chess medal hangs on the door.
I won a trade with the same kind of luck
I use for acquiring rare skin diseases

And here I am with all the poets in me waiting to eat

Mistletoe, and I, have poisonous berries,
And to make harmless little green things 
sharp, Really sharp 
takes a lot of mathematics

I have a friend who tries to figure me out, and I enjoy the attention
great fires love me and 
I have loved... 

oh how I have loved

old women 
because they are so dangerous.

"you are good!" said Dr Povlovski who took me in
And gave me a cell in his hospital
He tried to take my goodness, but I gave it away too fast
to the other patients
Screaming, crying, and easily beaten in monotonous games of chess.

The chessmaster I played was a Spanish girl of 24
and I was 16.
She could see as far as I could. 7 moves mas o menos

She made a great trade with me on the chess board,
And she congratulated me on forcing an equal trade.
Then she beat me
And gave me my medal for trying...

The monks moved the moon to help me escape

I have so many secrets that I am dying to share.
Teachers give the best gifts. Priceless gifts.
The gifts I gave my father... I gave him my heart so completely
As a child.

And then on and on I gave him ideas.
He honed them and wrote great things.

Once he showed me his brute strength... only once he showed me I could not beat him.
and then 5 years later, I was 9, and I beat him in a game of chess.


He never forgot how I gave him my whole heart,
Yet He dropped me
At the door of the greatest witch
This side of the Mississippi.


I love her now.

Discontinuity: A relationship with Free Will

04 Friday Oct 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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“In these writings Florensky defended the importance of the idea of “discontinuity” (a theme he undoubtedly picked up from his professor Bugaev), both in mathematics and in social behavior. Like many members of the Russian Intelligentsia of this time, Florensky believed that all intellectual life is a connected entity…Florensky was convinced that intellectually the nineteenth century, just ending, had been a disaster, and he wanted to identify and discredit what he saw as the “governing principle” of its calamitous effect. He saw that principle in the concept of “continuity,” the belief that one could not make the transition from one point to another without passing through all the intermediate points. In contrast to the “false” principle of continuity Florensky proposed what he saw as its morally, even religiously, superior opposite: discontinuity. He realized of course that this was not a new topic, and that discussion of the antinomy of continuity/discontinuity were very old, dating back to the Greeks. However, Florensky believed that the problem had a particular relevance to the beginning of the twentieth century “the cementing idea of continuity brought everything together into one gigantic monolith.

Florensky faulted his own field, mathematics, for creating this unfortunate monolith. Because of the strength of differential calculus, with its many practical applications, he maintained that mathematicians and philosophers tended to ignore those problems that could not be analyzed that way–the essentially discontinuous phenomena…And this emphasis on the continuous, Florensky believed, affected many areas of thought outside mathematics, Differentiable functions were “deterministic” and emphasis on them led to what Florensky saw as an unhealthy determinism throughout political and philosophical thought in general, most clearly in Marxism.

Intellectual modes based on continuity, said Florensky, had spread to geology, in the uniformitarian ideas of Lyell, and to Darwin, in the concept of evolution through gradual small change. Both opposed “leaps” in natural development and postulated smooth, even transformations. Florensky believed that similar ideas had influenced many other fields, including psychology, sociology, and religion.”pg87-88 Naming Infinity

Numbers are Metaphors

28 Saturday Sep 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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Tags

poetry, writing

Mathematics proposes numbers to measure real things. There are notches corresponding to numbers on the measuring tape, but even if the notches succeed in referring to that real position. (although they remain a sign of the real object), gaps are still on the measuring tape with no notch and no number to describe the intermediate positions.The real number system attempts to fill the gaps that most numbers leave when describing something real, removing the need for metaphor. “Metaphorical language is language proper to the extent that it is related to the need for making up for gaps of language”(Giuliani, 1972, p. 131). The system “covers the gaps” and does the job of describing physical reality (and more) without metaphor. But how do real numbers go about covering the gaps?

The work of covering the gaps and freeing real numbers from metaphor is done with The Axiom of Completeness:

A bounded increasing sequence has a least upper bound (that is a real number)

Why would the axiom of completeness cover all the gaps of a real line?

A good example is in the act of measuring a plank with a straight-looking side. One compares the plank with a measuring tape and measures the whole meters, but there is still some plank left to measure. (The number of whole meters is the first number (position)in the sequence.) So one counts the number of decimeters left (the resulting position is the second number in the sequence), but there still remains more plank after the largest marker for decimeters. The process continues until the precision of the measuring tape is exhausted, eyesight fails, or the measurer loses interest. Even though one must fail in measuring the exact length of the plank, the axiom of completeness provides assurances that there exists a real number for the “actual” length of the plank (and that there is an “actual” length of the plank). But the process cannot take the full measure of the plank, and so we remain in the poetic world of metaphor, “a process, not a definitive act; it is an inquiry, a thinking on” (Hejinian, 2000).

We want to talk about something real, something as simple and straightforward as the length of a plank. We have an apparatus of controlled inquiry, tools and will-more than the casual use of words, but we still fail.

We must admit that the measurements (words) we have used remain metaphorical and the actual measure of the plank (object) ultimately falls into the gaps of language. The words (measurements) we started with in our task of measuring the plank are no less metaphorical than the measurement we have when we stop. How can we wake up from metaphor?


(PDF) Many Roads from the Axiom of Completeness. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327227248_Many_Roads_from_the_Axiom_of_Completeness [accessed Sep 28 2024].

Slice of my life as a young man

09 Tuesday Jul 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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airport, autobiographical, luggage, travel

My trip to the airport: I dragged my box with my bike inside to the Loyala stop and onto the CTA train, where I ran into Kate, a girl I had met when asking directions two days before. She wore the same black beads both days. We talked and exchanged e-mail addresses, and I got off the train to transfer to the Foster bus. I had made handles out of packing tape, thinking I could carry the box, but I ended up using them to drag it instead the two blocks to the bus stop, missing four different Foster buses that went by. A Latino guy helped me across the street, but the Latino bus driver shook his finger at me and refused to let me on the bus. After a lot of wordless gestures, I was left alone on the curb.


So I called my brother Matt, saying, “I need help to carry this box back to the train and then through the airport!” We both knew that time was running low. As I waited for him to join me, another bus came up and the driver allowed me to get on. As I pushed my oversized box between the hand-rails of the door, he kept teasing me. “You have to pay for him, too!” he said. “Really?” I asked, discouraged, but one of the passengers, an older black man, just laughed, and I got the joke. On the bus, I called Matt again to ask him to trail me to the airport. There was no way I could get from the bus to the train at the Jefferson Park CTA station, and then from the CTA through the airport escalators and long walks to the check-in counter.


Thirty minutes later, I dragged my box off the bus. I had a good 20 meters to get to the escalator to the platform, when a guy who was tooling around on an ice-cream-vending-cycle (one with a big fridge out front) offered to put my box on his rig and roll it in for me, but only if I bought some ice cream. So I bought a basic ice cream sandwich ($2), and he did the rest, dropping me off at the turnstiles. I dragged it through and then made the last 10 feet to the escalator, when I heard the train coming. It was a mad rush to get the box through the door.


I called Matt with an update and asked him to follow me to the airport. He had just gotten off the bus and said he’d take the next train. I ate my melting ice-cream sandwich. The train neared O’Hare but then spent an extra 15 minutes standing, and when I finally got off and pushed my box onto the platform, there was Kate. She waved, laughed, and pretended not to be too impressed. While she helped me out of the station and through the turnstiles, where I could get a luggage trolley, she said she had taken the slower but easier route, going into the Loop on the Red Line and transferring to the Blue Line to O’Hare.


Getting a luggage trolley was another process. There was only one, but someone else had it, a guy who had just a newspaper to transport. I asked, but he refused to let me have it. Luckily he worked there, and his boss was watching. A few minutes later I had the luggage trolley and was on my way to the international terminal.


On the way I ran into Matt, who had this big grin, wild eyes, and poofy hair. No telling what he was thinking, finding me all the way there, with the luxury of pushing my box along in a luggage trolley. He walked me to the ticket counter, where a mean-looking ground agent proceeded to charge me $100 because the box was oversize. She next wanted to charge me an extra $25 because it was also overweight, but at that point I just said that would leave me with no money at all. So she took off the overweight charge. Lucky for me, Matt was there to give me all the cash he had on him. A little while later I took off with $30 in my pocket (but no cash card or credit card), on a plane to Venice.

21 Friday Jun 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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"Sitting is better than standing, and lying is better than sitting,

Better than lying, asleep, and better than sleeping: dead. »

Arthur Schopenhauer, Poems, translated by Métayer Guillaume in Catastrophes No. 45:

--

—

asleep is better than dead
lying down is better than asleep
sitting is better than lying down
walking is better than sitting
running is better than walking

sprinting endlessly, absolute tension over and against every thing

The flies eat the irritated skin everywhere your body can touch
eyes-on-fire, wretchedness and pain in every thought

two directions in a fork... which one will you choose?

i po dad green

20 Thursday Jun 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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i po dad green

red is unique
red is unique
red is unique
108 shades and hues of red

now,
green in the end of spring
the red flowers die
the quick and dirty sex just over
gently now

the shades of green are so many yet common
they show themselves in the hues of trees and undergrowth

Green makes us high, dizzy,
a disoriented drive down trip town

there is no need for events

the shade of trees is free, it is offered to everyone,

take it or leave it

Shades of green are made

to be free everywhere and to tame the spells of death

A prophecy of red
because you have been trained to follow,

nourished on green
are the hot, screaming butterflies.
The coolness of the green night,
wandering endlessly through the city,

until the dew

Ancient Cave Paintings

15 Saturday Jun 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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Tags

animals, art, poetry

If you'll allow my own special crudeness
A disability of being born a caveman
In a world where we have become powerful.

I like deer and buffalo.
I don't get hungry as often as you do, you have to eat all the time
yet my hunger is deeper.

My work is a triumph, it is pure magic
To make a likeness
On how animals move and still themselves.
there is nothing more excellent.

Everyone is a genius; I mean that; we jostle for attention.

I tried to follow this world, not knowing the many worlds under this thin veil. the one the Goddess changes to suit her mood. Cling to her veil and get swept away

(the Goddess is busy being glorious, voluptuous, serene.)

Genius does not depend on competition or collaboration.
It does not depend on what other people are doing or what they have or believe. 

The pioneers that get ignored, enumerated.

1) A monkey's hands are a pure genius.
2) A bird's beak is genius
3) The designs of spiders
4) The Stygian hollows of a wasp nest
5) sloths are lazy? Whatever it is they do is genius.
...

Some say our magic gets more and more real,
As if real or unreal was something I could weigh in my hand.

I see these animals and plants as they are to me,
their liquid intelligence commanding such graceful movements
stooping for water, hunting and praying to escape a hunt
why am I not recognized as being among them?

Is my magic still excellent?
even if I find myself in this time?

we still need our own liquid grace, our houses like the wasps,
we need the Art of the Sloth more than we know.

Now the old magic is called vandalism.
Is it because I stoop for the water and food I find
in an urban wilderness? I join the fox and the bird in drinking from a puddle in the park. What is good enough for them, is good enough for me.

To be truly wild is to live like a flame
brilliant, fragile
I feared for my life among cavemen,
and if I made a mistake I would be dead.

we have greater fear now

fear made us live, goading us to nourish our senses, of smell, of bare touch on soft cold earth, the brush that paints dew on our skin.

Plants appeared mighty then. A plant for every illness, every wellness, every star in the ancestral night sky. Their deep magic was dominant, not to be enslaved. A factory conformity of plants, called farming, should we allow that kind of life into our circle, where some of us are weeds? What does it mean to live as a farmer, and not a hunter?

Fear is collectively generated.

We cannot blame a few men or one god.

the colors I have touched on a cave wall, my magic of likenesses
On the subject of grace in the animal life, Now
I cannot paint them in a way that they are 20,000 years old.

My work earns destitution, donations of fear disguised as care, and a place among the gods... the one we created so we could deposit our fears into him.

such monstrous collective activity. 

yet, I accept your fear because that is what you need. 

I will be that foolish god for you, because a caveman knows not to guard his precious bulk against all the pain that courage brings.

I anoint you with a prayer for grace, and

"There is a hell of a good universe next door, let's go." --ee cummings

Riv9n

11 Tuesday Jun 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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Father Raven

Intelligence is a scavenger

A hoarder of shiny ideas, or
A collector of things of every color
mixed and stirred into black
A foolish lover of roads
A Monster
that only mates
with members of the same social class.

Speaker for the dead
Eater of the dead
leaves, leaver of marks.
They can grow to love, to collect an inedible fruit.

An inedible
apple

Coveted by hungry black
eyes.

The Silver Mind Keeps Dying

08 Saturday Jun 2024

Posted by Andrew Nightingale in Questions in Logic

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Tags

poetry


The Silver Mind Keeps Dying

        Consciousness is the feeling of negation: in the perception of ‘the stone as grey,’ such feeling is in barest germ; in the perception of ‘the stone as not grey,’ such feeling is in full development. (Whitehead, 1929: 161)

“I,” who supports myself on the shoulders of rocks,

cannot be counted in the coffers of knowledge.
This feeling of negation is a desire for knowledge.
No, it is not a knowledge of these rocks.
My knowledge is something better than rocks, something I can’t see, like the arch of the sky.

I ignore rocks because of the treasures in my mind.
I bet you don’t even know what I am thinking. You just see rocks.
Rocks with emerald carpets of moss, with tiny iridescent mushrooms.
A rock in the shape of a heart, or with the same care-lines of your very face, my love.

Rocks are the new clouds.
Watch from one to the next, watch with the blessing of ages, how they change shape.
Their darkness that weighs.
Their fault is their honesty, and they don’t care.
Lift one from the paths of memory and find your true self.
Lift it, carry its body home and carefully wash away the moss and soil.
You will find a naked man inside, blinking at your face like the new sun.

No, I like my theory better, because it belongs to me:

  1. language is the damp nether of a forgotten boulder
  2. the brightest words are worthless
        to the brilliant nose of a dog.

sensitivity is an excess:
too much from a shapely line of text,
a sensuality of braille,
or the silent song.

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