LOGIC: Did they get it wrong?

Logic simply confirms the rules for object behaviors through contradiction and tautology, and does not have a transcendental basis.

For example,

if 'p and not-p' is a contradiction then we express the rules for physical objects, and

if 'p and not-p' is a tautology then we express the rules for phenomenal objects.

And,

if 'either p or not p' is a tautology then we express the rules for physical objects, and

if 'either p or not p' is a contradiction then we express the rules for phenomenal objects (such as colours).

This legitimises contradiction, authorising it not as a censure as it is delivered by traditional logic, but as a descriptor with the same status as tautology.

The problem is that traditional logicians fail to notice the assumption that their logic is physicalist, so a contradiction appears as a censure, and not as a description of phenomenal object behavior.

In that regard, it is important to realise that there can be no expression of censure or process of deduction in logic that uses it, and that if one attempts to express it, as in '"physical p and not physical p" is a contradiction', then we simply make a mis-statement, which in the end is equivalent to: ' '

The attempt to fill in the void in that last set of inverted commas is what made Wittgenstein feel the need to remind us about saying and showing, that such a void cannot be filled.

Logic does not use, apply or oversee deduction, its lengthy "deductive" processes are mingled expressions of object behaviors and mis-statements, the latter of which should be left void.

Like every other post shown here, this has not been academically aired before, so I'm mindful of its first expression here.

 

SELF-REFERENCE Which is "this sentence"?
A pointing, self-referential language is always animistic. Pointing or referring is always a mapping, and mappings are intentional.

Thus, a self-referential syntax must be transcendentally ideal. Whereas, all of mathematics is currently transcendentally real. The difference between them is that the former sets up syntax through enabling (intentional) conditions, while the latter sets up syntax through the syntax itself.

Transcendental idealism and transcendental realism are the two mutually exhaustive and exclusive possible interpretations of syntax.

In other words, a mathematics that deploys a transcendentally ideal syntax is animistic and independent of a mathematics that deploys a transcendentally real syntax. Self-reference cannot be represented in our current transcendentally real mathematics.

The "MANY WORLDS " hypothesis

We ought not to ask whether an event has occurred or not - events only arise in the context of a world. And as far as worlds go, there is a distinction between worlds that are identical and worlds that are not. The former are uncountable.

"Counterfactuals" and "factuals" are terms that cannot be applied to "many worlds". We cannot single out events from a world. We can describe an event only in the context of a world.

There is a problem with that also. For it looks as though "many worlds" must be imaged or viewed from the context of only one world - the world that we know. As such, they appear as empty surrogates of our world, for which their description as "actuality" is a conceit.

"Many worlds" is a "transcendentally real" formulation. The idea supposes that objects are carved out in Nature and correspond to their appearances, independently of that appearance.

In "transcendental idealism", however, there is no prospect for "many worlds", no prospect for objects as independent existents. In TI objects are items of knowledge constructed from templates of experience. To premise the idea of other worlds and the same but "other" selves on the notion of our own world requires a template that isn't found in our world.

The Integral Text - A textual mechanism responsible for the analytic/continental divide, and divides in general.

A textual mechanism underpinning the analytic/continental divide, and academic divides in general. My thesis presents arguments in support of the idea that the source of the analytic-continental divide is organizational and is not grounded in conceptual differences or partisanship. It is a problem that is a consequence of the structure of the University "text" itself. This text I refer to as the integral text. It is a tangible, self-referring, non-subjective structure through which the University stores knowledge and retains influence.

Random Events?

Are there random events? Neither an affirmation nor a denial can redeem a confusion. Chance, or a random event, refers to the internal structure, or source, of an event if, and only if, that structure or source has not been allocated or identified. The idea of randomness as a "inherent property" identifies not the lack of a property, but a failure to denote the idea of one.

Altruism

Altruism is against one's own self.
Any self is one's own self.
Any self constitutes all selves.
Altruism is against all selves.

Is Intelligence an Ability?

I argue that intelligence is not an ability. IQ and intelligence are marks of a social movement that is conceptually grounded on the idea of the "universal object". The universal object is an object, and its behavior, that is supposedly present to all life-forms, and that all life-forms have a measurable ability to articulate. More than an anthropomorphic formulation, though humankind is its primary focus, the "universal object" is a premise, an assumption, that appears to facilitate the comparative measure of the ability of not only individuals, but species. I challenge that premise.

Art is theft

ART IS THEFT
Art is theft. The aesthetic experience of art is trophyism. Trophyism is the pleasure of surveying stolen goods. Art is sponsored by legal theft, gambling and the state lottery.
Art swims in blood. The blood is the blood of the culture whose artefacts have been torn from its heart, stolen from the traditions and values that alone gave them meaning.

Art museums are the butcher's shop of culture. Critics dismember culture on its slab and display its still-twitching artefacts in their galleries.
The western art critic is The Great Urinator. His mark is "art", and it showers all cultures. Noses are lifted, for the mark is assessment. Assessed goods, or trophies, are sold to the adulating who adorn their homes with micturated cultural counterfeits.

The Elimination of Time and Space

Time and Space can be eliminated without upsetting the natural order. My thesis is that temporal and spatial relatedness describe independent events, and not continua like space or time.

1) The elimination of TIME
The duration of a sequence of events is the number of events in the sequence. It is not, as we generally regard it, a given section of a continuum that we call Time.

A storm warning: for science and religion

Over the horizon of public perception a conceptual storm lays waste doctrinal differences in the intelligent design debate, revealing their common foundation  – animism. A comprehensive animism must impute not merely spirit to common objects but its accompaniments such as autonomy and intention.

Are the Brain Sciences trashing the Human Wardrobe?

The brain sciences impose limits on our knowledge of human experience. Their knowledge base is prescriptive, not instructive. Claims for advancement in the reductionist brain sciences are necessarily unfounded and are a cause for public concern.

Is Nature Consistent?

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By theoretical appointment, materials posturing in the quantum mode are unpredictable - a muse which annoyed Einstein who said that Nature didn't throw dice.
And Godel, seeking to undermine the then currently popular mathematical view of Nature, established to almost universal academic acclaim the inconsistency or unprovability of certain mathematical statements in any supposedly mathematically defined system, showing that Nature wasn't mathematically assayable.

The Philosophy of Logic

It is remarkable that we have descriptions of the laws of logic but few descriptions of the nature of logic itself.  Wittgenstein, often a last resort for our debunking needs, describes the nature of logic "logic is trancendental". That is, logic provides a foundation or ground, in this case, as it happens, for the world "structure". He also identifies this ground as "necessary" when describing the propositions of logic as tautologies. A tautology is necessarily true - "either it is raining or it is not raining". This confuses the transcendental with the transcendent* for conditions or grounds are only necessary for the objects they ground or identify. To make those grounds absolute or self-justifying is to confuse the grounds for an object with the object itself. But then commentators on logic, including Wittgenstein, suffer from that over-familiarity that paints its cultural totems into a self-evident or transcendent, corner.

Logic is a contingent element in the ad infinitum of legitimacy. Logic, or rather a logic,

Medieval perspective and reality

Medieval perspective presents us with what we may regard as a quaint "flat" view of objects. Yet this may be a better representation of spatiality than our modern three-dimensional perspective which makes objects appear from an arbitrary, privileged, single point or viewer. Even so, there is a yet more real way of representing objects. That is to privilege NO viewing point over another, and to view objects from all points.

Autism and modern Eugenics

The autist, a modern creation, is a person fronted by his eugenic image - a perfected normalcy made achievable by clinical authority. This image differs from those offered by the eugenics programs conducted in the war-torn industrial west of the last century, though the goal of a perfection endures.

It is not the autist, the person, that suffers from his unattained perfection, despite the clinical directive. It is the autist's clinically created perfect image that suffers from the autist. The autist, the person, not the image, is reduced to a physical "condition". Failing the test of autonomous personhood he must instead posture as a lesser, socially disenfranchised archetype -  The Patient. For this clinical thing, The Patient, holidays become therapies, associates become helpers, home-life a tick-box activity of tasks achieved.

Intelligent design and Dawkin's designoid

A God-given intelligent design is or has the same form as a randomly-given, Dawkinian designoid or mere appearance of a design. A life-form given to us through an act of divine design has the same form viewed as a product of random selection. On that, Dawkins and the creationists must be agreed: both refer to the same object in contention, to the same form.

Both parties then turn to a misbegotten idea. Their wrath, their passion, is mailed to both a Creator and random Nature, but delivered to a mechanic. Their idea is that a material assembly identifies a design or appearance of a design, and that by examining how the materials are assembled a divine design can be distinguished from a mere appearance of one.

Animism in Mathematics and Logic

Logic and mathematics provide Science with its higher foundations, but there is nothing esoteric about the animism that backs them up.

By employing Cantor's diagonal slash Godel animated the syntax in his incompleteness theorems. These theorems were an animistic variation on the idea that symbols and propositions can, under their own steam as it were, refer to their own position in the text in which they appear. Elsewhere, old favourites such as an object is identical to itself, A=A, and "this sentence is false (or true)" become strangely animated when we look at them, as if endowed with the power to show us the position on the page they are printed on.

A casually-accepted animism baptises all mathematical objects with a hidden identity, an identity that can, like the genie in the bottle, be summoned for some (mathematical) task. And no greater summons is made than by Goedel's (animistic) incompleteness theorems which, for Goedel, show us how the natural kingdom is independent of mathematical machinations or calculi. This is ironic, as it is really only in the natural kingdom that identity can be found.

Skepticism

Skeptics are transcendental realists, or animists. They believe that objects have the properties of their appearances, that light of 650nm really is red, that a tree makes a sound when it falls, etc.

This is a totemic anthropomorphism. That is, objects (the totems) belong to the human and scientific community in an intimate and mystical way. Intimate because objects and Man share common experiences and characteristics (e.g. light of 650nm is red in itself, and red as it appears to humans). Even if the match between how a thing is and how it appears is only approximate, the animistic objects remains unchallenged. Further,  there is no bridge between such objects and our experience of them, not even one of approximation.

Rationalism or empiricism are also animistic. Empiricism is based on observations mediated through the senses. But "senses" is a muddled player here. It is both, and neither, a physical object and an object of experience. The two objects have different properties. The fact that empiricism merges them into one pseudo-object that is in itself what it appears to be, is transcendental realism. The senses are totems of an animistic philosophy and science.

Rationalism is animistic because the objects that it considers, even though stripped down to their bare spatio-temporal essentials (logical objects also are grounded in spatio-temporal behaviours) are thought of as independent entities that are themselves how they appear.

What is strange in all this is that the Church, too, is inevitably grounded in animism. The very fact that God can be considered to be omnipotent or omniscience requires the prior belief in a world of self-identifying physical objects, where some events themselves are good or bad. It supposes a world where objects are as they appear to be, whether such appearance is approximate or not. At least then, in their fundamental beliefs, skepticism and the church are joined - at the hip, or so the phrase goes, in animism.

This statement is false

"This statement is false"

Which is "this statement"? That question kills it, dead.

But then we can ponder, and ask "what is a statement"?
Really speaking, there is no such entity as a "statement". There are meanings, to be sure, but what the devil is a "statement" - it's just a pile of shapes.

We might say that at least the pile of shapes is identifiable as the physical ground of the statement.

In which case
"this statement is false" or even "this statement is true"
only points to a position on the page.

How can it do that? Is a pile of shapes, the "statement", animated in some way? Is it like a sign-post? it can't point itself out, there is no identity here. And, in any case, isn't a pile of shapes only identified through the emergence of a specific meaning (and meanings are always specific)?

Does it make sense to say that something can point precisely, even to a position on the page? No. The shapes involved in the act of pointing, the signpost itself, only point significantly through an arbitrary set of publicly endorsed rules.

We might object and say that the pile of shapes, the statement, is at least identifiable or we would not be able to focus on the shapes in an attempt to given them a meaning. But the set of rules that make us attend to a particular set of shapes, rules like a capital letter, letter proximity and full-stop, isn't the same thing as giving them a meaning or allowing a meaning to emerge.

I can find no grounds on which "the statement is false" or even "this statement is true" can be significantly entertained.

Tractatus

Wittgenstein's Tractatus presented the philosophical community with an enigma: Wittgenstein said of it that "..anyone who understands me eventually recognise [my Tractarian propositions] as nonsense" (T. 6.54), and "the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive" (T..preface)

The two camps of Tractarian opinion suggest that either the whole work was in Witt's eyes mere nonsense, that being the end of it, or that he used "elucidatory" "nonsense" to evoke a syntactically inexpressable mystery. I suggest, there is no conflict between the idea of the Tractatus as both nonsense and truth if we take a transcendental view, specifically a transcendentally ideal (after Kant) view.

Here, objects, such as the elements of a syntax, do not arise independently as if taking on the properties of their appearance, but require conditions that set up the limits, physical or epistemological, for their appearance. Without those conditions the syntax is nonsense in the sense of gibberish, but with those conditions in (their rightful) place, they can be identified as existing and subject to truth and falsity. Simply to exist is not a sufficient criterion for the appearance or manifestation of an object.

"Truths" pertain only to syntax, and not to the transcendental conditions that identify the objects or elements of a syntax. Authors elsewhere (see Badiou) speak of "truths" and "acts" in the same way.  In the Tractatus Wittgenstein was driven by the idea that propositions deliver their meaning syntactically, where each element contributes as a summation or total to the meaning of the proposition. The elements of the syntax of the Tractatus that are subject to assessments of truth are his logical propositions. These are modelled on a physical syntax or behaviour, like the syntax of mathematics. Truths refer, then, only to the elements of that syntax, their structures, position and behaviours or its "ontology". Thus for Wittgenstein, Tractarian truths really are truths. Just like, for example, it is true that this element or object is (or is not) behind that element or object. These are syntactical truths for a physical ontology. There are other ontolgies.

"Nonsense", on the other hand, refers 1) to the necessarily failed attempt of any syntax  (Tractarian propositions in this case) to describe that framework that selects or identifies syntactical elements and, 2) to the gibberish of any supposed syntax that attempts to offer its services to meaning without its identifying condition. Thus, the propositions, elements, or syntax of the Tractatus could not of themselves be configured in such a way that they could describe their own identifying framework, rather they must show it simply by being said or expressed. For example, in a bouquet the syntax of flowers, or set (sum or total) of flowers, could never of themelves describe, identify or manifest the bouquet. In this case the set of flowers correspond to the propositions of the Tractatus and their manifesting conditions, the bouquet, are the propositions of the Tractarian preface, in this fashion:

Wittgenstein could say of the Tractarian text but in the body of the Tractarian text that his propositions were nonsense or elucidations where they assert, manifest or identify themselves; and he could say, without conflict, but only in the preface to the text, that these same propositions were true where the preface is the transcendental, identifying, or manifesting condition of the propositions or elements within the Tractarian text. Without that identifying condition they are, indeed, nonsense. Yet as truths, they appear unchanged, as they were written.

Wittgenstein said that logic was transcendental, but he did not directly distinguish between transcendentally real and ideal. He may have meant to use the term in its unexpanded form to describe a vision of logic as transcendent and ineffable, as an absolute that cannot itself be described or said, except through its elements or syntax. This vision may have prevented full expression of what he must have intuited. This barely expressed intuition of Wittgenstein is that the Tractarian text and preface appear together as a trancendentally ideal undertaking in which the syntax expresses true propositions; but considered on its own merits - without the transcendentally ideal condition for its identification, appears as expressed nonsense offering a set of trancendentally real propositions that in turn offer a transcendent logic that asserts, but is unable to identify, its own syntax.