Doug -
Thanks for weighing in here... as an aside, I skimmed "Garden World" and
found it compelling... I hope others here will take the time!
On the thread topic, it would be rather "convenient" in many ways if
there were such an isomorphism as Owen seeks (postulates), but I find it
to reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of "what is knowledge"?
Other parts of the thread, relating to the question of semantics begins
to address this. Intuitively, it is like thinking that one can make
visual art without awareness of the negative space and the context it
exists in, or of writing poetry (or really anything but the driest of
prose as well?) without appreciating that it much of what is being said
is "between the lines".
I have a friend who wrote a program to parse and analyze the logic in
Aquinas' /Summa Theologica/ and claimed to find numerous (but not
outrageous) simple errors in his logic. That isn't in any way close to
imagining that one could translate such a text into symbolic logic and
determine anything (else) more significant from it than internal
consistency and/or consistency with some external axiomatic system.
- Steve
Philosophy is very broad and includes many things like ethics and
anesthetics. A good test case would be not logic, but poetry.
Blessings,
Doug
http://dougcarmichael.com
http://gardenworldpolitics.com
On Apr 16, 2013, at 9:25 AM, Owen Densmore <o...@backspaces.net
<mailto:o...@backspaces.net>> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 13, 2013 at 2:05 PM, Nicholas Thompson
<nickthomp...@earthlink.net <mailto:nickthomp...@earthlink.net>> wrote:
Can anybody translate this for a non programmer person?
Nick's question brings up a project I'd love to see: an attempt at an
isomorphism between computation and philosophy. (An isomorphism is a
1 to 1, onto mapping from one to another, or a bijection.)
For example, in computer science, "decidability" is a very concrete
idea. Yet when I hear philosophical terms, and dutifully look them
up in the stanford dictionary of philosophy, I find myself suspicious
of circularity.
Decidability is interesting because it proves not all computations
can successfully expressed as "programs". It does this by using two
infinities of different cardinality (countable vs continuum).
Does philosophy deal in constructs that nicely map onto computing,
possibly programming languages?
I'm not specifically concerned with decidability, only use that as an
example because it shows the struggle in computer science for
modeling computation itself, from Finite Automata, Context Free
Languages, and to Turing Machines (or equivalently lambda calculus).
I don't dislike philosophy, mainly thanks to conversations with Nick.
And I do know that axiomatic approaches to philosophy have been
popular.
So is there a possible isomorphism?
-- Owen
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