Understanding versus Analytic Philosophy.
Posted: Wed Mar 04, 2020 10:16 pm
Philosophy is the name for the western tradition (inclusive of the university tradition of the art of experiment/science or philosophy/knowledge or science in the older sense stemming ultimately from Athens), but if you replace it with the qualified form "analytic philosophy" you come to a game. The greatest change in the last hundred years is effected by the attempt to exclude meaning form philosophy. And to replace it with games or rules. In all effect "logic" in the post Whitehead Russel and Tarski and possibly Frege meaning it excludes all reality. In the simple sense it becomes an engine for generating axiomatic games. It excludes the question of whether any given proposition or premise is reasonable or real.
One subtle question is whether maths are really analytic. Kant denied it. Balzac says: "Thus, you will never find in all nature two identical objects; in the natural order, therefore, two and two can never make four, for, to attain that result, we must combine units that are exactly alike, and you know that it is impossible to find two leaves alike on the same tree, or two identical individuals in the same species of tree. That axiom of your numeration, false in visible nature, is false likewise in the invisible universe of your abstractions, where the same variety is found in your ideas, which are the objects of the visible world extended by their interrelations; indeed, the differences are more striking there than elsewhere."
It is curious to suppose even in maths that the axioms truly bound the possibility of the discoveries of maths. In a certain sense it is obviously more cogent to assume that whatever is discovered in maths rebounds back to the basic blocks and changes their meaning. Thus, 7 understood as a whole number does not already contain every adventure it may take in topology or in the drunken walk of the topologist. But, only when it is so thought through does it then show itself to have always had the supposed possibility of such sorties.
In the case of chess the problem shows itself in another light, though different. Checkers is a "solvable" game. One can know all possibilities in it. Everything synthetic can be worn though and come to rest in the meanings of the moves. Whereas in chess the game is not yet exhausted an may be unsustainable. And in maths all the less so is it possible that it could be exhausted. Thusly the basic meaning of any number is never analytic, and always acquiring a new meaning.
One subtle question is whether maths are really analytic. Kant denied it. Balzac says: "Thus, you will never find in all nature two identical objects; in the natural order, therefore, two and two can never make four, for, to attain that result, we must combine units that are exactly alike, and you know that it is impossible to find two leaves alike on the same tree, or two identical individuals in the same species of tree. That axiom of your numeration, false in visible nature, is false likewise in the invisible universe of your abstractions, where the same variety is found in your ideas, which are the objects of the visible world extended by their interrelations; indeed, the differences are more striking there than elsewhere."
It is curious to suppose even in maths that the axioms truly bound the possibility of the discoveries of maths. In a certain sense it is obviously more cogent to assume that whatever is discovered in maths rebounds back to the basic blocks and changes their meaning. Thus, 7 understood as a whole number does not already contain every adventure it may take in topology or in the drunken walk of the topologist. But, only when it is so thought through does it then show itself to have always had the supposed possibility of such sorties.
In the case of chess the problem shows itself in another light, though different. Checkers is a "solvable" game. One can know all possibilities in it. Everything synthetic can be worn though and come to rest in the meanings of the moves. Whereas in chess the game is not yet exhausted an may be unsustainable. And in maths all the less so is it possible that it could be exhausted. Thusly the basic meaning of any number is never analytic, and always acquiring a new meaning.