Brent Meeker wrote:
>
>
>1Z wrote:
> >
> > Brent Meeker wrote:
> >
> >
> >>You misunderstand "population models". It's not a question of what
>members of a species think or
> >>vote for; it's a matter of whether their logic will lead to their
>survival in the evolutionary
> >>biological sense. So the majority can be wrong.
> >
> >
> > Cooper is making valid comments about *something*, but it isn't logic.
> > Logic is what tells us the majority can be wrong
>
>Cooper is not talking about logic in the formal sense; he's talking about
>reasoning, making
>decisions, acting. This can be "wrong" in the sense that there is a better
>(in terms of survival)
>way of reasoning.
>
>I'm not sure that logic in the formal sense can be right or wrong; it's a
>set of conventions about
>language and inference. About the only standard I've seen by which a logic
>or mathematical system
>could be called "wrong" is it if it is inconsistent, i.e. the axioms and
>rules of inference allow
>everything to be a theorem.
If this is all that Cooper is talking about, I probably wouldn't have any
objection to it--but Lennart Nilsson seemed to be making much stronger
claims about the contingency of logic itself based on his interpretation of
Cooper.
Jesse
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Received on Sun Jul 09 2006 - 21:07:04 PDT