Talk:Introduction to Philosophy/Logic/Truth and Validity

I mentioned reductionism on the main page. 'Is such reductionism healthy?' might be a good topic for a student essay, but probably not for a student doing their first course in logic.

--212.56.114.4 11:44, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

When learning logic, it took me a long time to grasp the difference between $$\vdash$$ and &rarr;, and I still haven't worked out how best to explain this. Anyone care to offer a succinct statement of their differences, and how they are related? --publunch 12:00, 17 Nov 2004 (UTC)

conclusion 'follows from' premises. What does 'follows from' mean? Well, we could reduce this to something syntactic, that one is making moves permitted by the formal language game, but this is side-stepping the issue. Or it could could describe that eureka feeling when you see that q really is a consequence of p - 'follows from' here is a psychological event. But this doesn't seem to be enough. It is as if one needs to have a doctrine Clear and Distinct Ideas that the psychological 'eureka' is not a deception.

--publunch 11:41, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

The reductionist program of reducing reason to rules of inference - Well, cool enough. But these rules have been distilled from our experience of the big world out there. Our rules aren't necessarily god the creator of the world, rather the world is creator of our rules.

--publunch 12:48, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

'intuitively obvious' - I think there is a conversation between Achilles and a tortoise somewhere in Hofstadter and Dennett's Godel Escher Bach. The tortoise in this conversation refuses to take even the most basic rule of inference as being intuitively obvious. It is a rather long conversation. This is a mildly entertaining little piece and I can recommend it to anyone who can lay their hands on the book. Indeed the whole book is entertaining. I'll try to find the full bibliographic details, then I'll put in a proper reference to it in the main text and then delete this note.

--publunch 10:06, 20 Nov 2004 (UTC)