I recently finished Laurie Endicott Thomas’s book _Not Trivial_. I learned much more than I would have expected. More so about English grammar than Logic. For example, I had never heard of “the Royal Order of Adjectives.” I did remember most of how to diagram a sentence.
Studied some today. Seems not as difficult as I expected.
I have installed MiKTeX – seems to work – need to learn a lot.
I have been thinking a lot. I am considering (and inclined toward) the view that we must restrict ourselves to a first-order language. As I recall, Quine believed this. I think it destroys most of math. But science can, I think, get along with just rational numbers. It is possible… Continue reading
I have already used prolog in my philosophy. I have started preparing to use Xlisp and OPS5. I found a more current version of Xlisp than I had and compiled it & it seemed OK. (I also have a version of common lisp). I hope to get OPS5 working with… Continue reading
I’ve started Susan Schneider’s book by that title – named after Fodor’s book. I’ve read just the preface and first chapter, which is an introduction. My impression, so far, is that I will be more in agreement with Fodor. I have started writing my reactions, but not yet enough to… Continue reading
I finished it today. He has good arguments against many common assumptions. He shows the possibility of some alternatives, but they really do not go very far in a positive way. Of course it was published in 1975. I have much more to study.
I am done for now on my diffeq program. But I need to be doing some programming. I think I will be going back to the prolog programming I was doing a few years ago on philosophy.
Even though there is a non-denumerable number of real numbers, there is only a denumerable number of them we can represent in a finitary logic. The real numbers which we can represent can be set to a one to one correspondence to the rational numbers, or even just the natural… Continue reading
I have been thinking about continuity from my study of Goedel, and suspect logicism must be wrong. I got to thinking about some of what I read recently in Naming Infinity. I got 4 of Poincare’s books for the Kindle last night (very low price) and looked at Brouwer’s (they… Continue reading