Geneaology of Specious Dualisms

Dace edace at flinthills.com
Sun Apr 2 10:58:00 PDT 2000


Hi Curtiss.


>> To put the matter more plainly, 2 + 2 did not equal
>> 4 until somebody created the concepts of "number,"
>> "addition," and "equal."
>
>I'm not going to declare "God made the integers, all
>the rest is the work of man!" as Brouwer did, but my
>*gut feeling* (can't get more unscientific than that)
>is with the *positive integers and their properties*
>(I'm restricting it to that set because I believe the
>Greeks had trouble with 0) we may have entities that
>are innate to the brain and its processes.
>
You're saying that numbers, which are abstract, are in the brain, which is concrete. This is not coherent. What is your gut feeling-- that numbers are innate to our minds, or that the mind is innate to the brain? Seems to me the first qualifies as unmediated knowledge (gut feeling) while the second is just a common, unreflective belief in this society.


>On another topic, you made a distinction that I find
>bewildering, i.e., that descriptions are not
>representations. If anything it seems (there goes
>that gut feeling again, no science today boy) that
>what are called "descriptions" are a proper subset of
>what are called "representations."
>
I can't see any difference between these two words. They're synonyms. (Why not claim that representations are a subset of descriptions?) You'll have to find the passage where I claimed that descriptions are not representations. Then I can tell you what I'd intended to say.

Ted



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