On 17 Sep, 00:52, David Nyman <david.ny....domain.name.hidden> wrote:
> 2009/9/16 Flammarion <peterdjo....domain.name.hidden>:
>
> > The knowabilitry of a claim about what powers numbers
> > have can only depend on what labels are correctly attached.
> > Petrol is not flammable just becaue I attached the label
> > "flammable" to it. Petrol *Is* flammable, and that
> > makes the label-attachment correct.
>
> Yes, but 'flammable' and 'exists' are horses of different colours,
> surely. You and Bruno are disputing whether mathematics is a formal
> abstraction from physics or vice versa. But in either case this seems
> to me fundamentally a question of methodological, not ontic, priority.
In either case the conclusion is ontological , so the assumptions
must be.
> We cannot hope to have any final criterion for what is really real;
> rather we search for the deepest theory we can find, one that can
> explain whatever we are currently persuaded needs explaining, and in
> terms of which we are able to subsume subsidiary theories. Then we
> feel justified in saying that our theory describes what exists. Isn't
> that about the size of it?
Yep, and if the conclusion is ontological, the process that reaches it
is ontological.
Bruno thinks he can reach an ontological assumption starting with pure
maths.
But he can't. "mathematical existence" means that mathematicians take
certain "exists" statements to be true. Whether "exists" should be
taken
literally in the mathematical context is an ontological question, as
the material
in the first posting indicates
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Received on Thu Sep 17 2009 - 14:55:10 PDT