Cooper says that a formalist, with only formal constraints on his logic
(such as consistensy) is at the mercy of the formalism itself. Such a
formalism is allways a special case, but Cooper warns of the danger that
classical logic is not recognized as such. He calls for a relativistic
evolutionary logic where classical logic only would be justified for certain
special classes of problems. An evolutionary metatheory of logic would
recognize which those problems are.
LN
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Från: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
[mailto:everything-list.domain.name.hidden] För Jesse Mazer
Skickat: den 10 juli 2006 03:06
Till: everything-list.domain.name.hidden
Ämne: Re: SV: Only logic is necessary?
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 Mon Jul 10 2006 - 07:13:10 PDT