|
|
|
|
|
by omon
2939 days ago
|
|
Wholly irrelevant, the paper is specifically concerned with recovering a dialectic between W. O. Quine and M. Dummett. Even if the question was the more general, "Is Logic Metaphysics?", knowledge of formal logics isn't even of concern. It's trivial that we can construct a plethora of axioms with their own definitions, the problem remains: to even adhere to those definitions one is exercising another intuitive logic—even in the case of computation which is an engineered construction to proxy this very intuition, otherwise we would have never been concerned with the linear properties necessary for computation to begin with. |
|
The experience of truth and logical consistency is entirely subjective. We can build networks of concepts that trigger the experience in ourselves and in others, but that doesn't make them objectively true - it makes them subjectively persistent and shared.
We acquired a cat recently, and it's interesting that her experience of basic spatial relationships is very different to ours.
She doesn't have the same experience of physics that we do. She sometimes gets confused by inside vs outside, and her experience of moving objects seems to be different to ours. She also gives the impression of experiencing hands and feet as disconnected objects, and not part of a gestalt "human".
We have no guarantees that from an alien point of view, our own experience of physics and of relationships doesn't have equivalent limitations. If the limitations exist, we're not aware of them. But to the extent that our cat's view of the world is probably recognisable by other cats, she's not aware of her limitations either.
It's more of a stretch, but not impossible, that our experience of logical abstraction and consistency may also have limitations. There may be non-human viewpoints where the basic subjective qualia of truth and consistency are more coherent, reliable, and inclusive than our own.
None of this can be proved, but it seems optimistic to me to believe that our version of logic is as good as logic can possibly be.