In Defense of Penrose. That everybody --including materialists, empiricists and rationalists--is a Platonist
Empiricism is the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from sense experience. Rationalism is the doctrine that reason alone is a source of knowledge and is independent of experience. Materialism is a combination of both philosophies. These may sound like completely diffierent doctrines, but my point here is that all of these pursuits ultimately rely on intuition. They afre both subbranches of intjuitionism. Why ? Concerning rationalism, even deductive logic requires intuition to arrive at a conclusilon. Concering empiricism, it is fairly obvious to see that experience alone cannot provide us any conclusion. If you dpoubt that, consider Peirce's three categories, in which Secondness is the category of intuion, leading us from an experience to a fact. So Penrose's recent excursion into Platonism should be taken more seriously, for ultimately his criticizers, the empiricists and the rationalists, are both Platonists. Dr. Roger Clough NIST (ret.) 6/14/2013 See my Leibniz site at http://team.academia.edu/RogerClough -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
