long_void t1_iqorhh2 wrote on October 1, 2022 at 11:55 PM

Reply to comment by TMax01 in “The objective requires the subjective as a foil if it is to play the scientific role late nineteenth-century philosophers assigned to it, not to mention to become accessible through our perceptual apparatus in new kinds of mathematical and logical symbolism.” by Maxwellsdemon17

I wrote about this idea, of the false dichotomy between subjectivity and objectivity, as a topic in formal logic Avatar Modal Subjectivity. The basic principle is that one can talk about "uniform subjectivity" as when a proposition holds necessarily, but not mentioning whether this is "true" or "false". Hence, there are languages that can't talk about objectivity in that sense, e.g. music, where the digital signal 0000... and 1111... in the raw audio channel both means silence.

TMax01 t1_iqp3rms wrote on October 2, 2022 at 1:35 AM

It is my understanding (possible naive, inadequate, or downright incorrect) that in formal logic, there is no "true" or "false", there is only 'necessary'. What in vernacular we would call "true" is something that is both necessarily true from the perspective of having to be true as the result of being based on true premises and necessary that it be true as a consequence of being relied on as a premise of true conjectures. In logic, as in math (I don't accept that there is a distinction between them) there is no true or false, just correct or incorrect computation.

It was my first inkling of a break with the perspective of Richard Dawkins when, after prevaricating a bit about the nature of truth (re: mathematics) he declared he was only a "90% atheist", that on a scale if 1 to 10, his certainty that God doesn't exist was only a 9. Once I accepted his uncertainty on that matter, I eventually was able to recognize the flaws in his theory of "adaptive altruism", and that set me on a course to reconstructing philosophy from the ground up, while trying to comprehend the implications of Benjamin Libet's work on cognition.

As for the bit about audio channels and Avatar, just to clarify, when I use the term "language", I mean only natural organic human language, not formal systems of logic or mathematics or computer programming methods or conventions, or metaphoric analogues of language like music or bee dances or whale song.

long_void t1_iqp58nl wrote on October 2, 2022 at 1:47 AM

What you refer to as "necessary" comes from Modal Logic, which is interpreted by many as "true for all possible worlds". In formal Type Theory, this correspond to something provable from an empty context. However, ordinary Propositional Logic has "true" and "false".

You are correct in the way that Propositional Logic requires an interpretation, which usually covers the entire language when given. This means that there is not a unique way to interpret Propositional Logic, hence no unique way of interpreting "true" and "false". However, you can also not exclude the possibility of interpreting these values as literally true and false respectively.

I am not familiar with Benjamin Libet's work, so thanks for mentioning him.

What is language? That is an interesting question. I do not know the answer. However, I know that many people underestimate e.g. Propositional Logic because their brains can't comprehend what an exponential semantics is like. You have to learn it yourself to understand (in my opinion).

I don't think there is anything special about natural language, or any special property, which can not be used as an interpretation of some formal language. Now, the problem might be that what you consider some kind of "intrinsic quality" of natural language is hard to make precise, since you only have natural language to appeal to (I guess?). What do you think?

TMax01 t1_iqpa8i3 wrote on October 2, 2022 at 2:28 AM

>However, I know that many people underestimate e.g. Propositional Logic because their brain's can't comprehend what an exponential semantics is like.

An intriguing claim. I am of the mind that language, being something that everyone uses every day, must be rooted in mechanisms that don't require extensive study. But I can appreciate the perspective that our brains are doing a lot more computational processing than our minds are aware of. It just seems most probable to me that if Propositional Logic or similar formal systems were relevant, the last two and a half thousand years of philosophy (and civilization) would have been quite different.

>I don't think there is anything special about natural language, or any special property, which can not be used as an interpretation of some formal language. Now, the problem might be that what you consider some kind of "intrinsic quality" of natural language is hard to make precise, since you only have natural language to appeal to (I guess?). What do you think?

I think the truth is that everything about natural language is "special", that language itself is a special property; in general it is identical to and coincident with consciousness, an apparently unique emergent property of human brains. It is this very speciality, the ability to "interpret" things, which enables us to invent formal systems of logic and call them (mistakenly, in my opinion) languages. Without the intrinsic quality of natural language, which is about accuracy rather than precision, how are we to create, develop, and communicate computational code systems, or appeal about anything with anything to anyone? Every beast with a brain performs logic as an inherent capacity of having a neural network, why would natural language even exist if formal logic could provide any useful information without the foundation of arbitrary reasoning to communicate emotions and experiences well enough to develop civilizations complex enough to allow mathematicians and analytic philosophers to survive.