Ian, Matt,

I have been haunted by something I read a while ago:  All knowledge is to some 
degree 
false because it is to some degree incomplete.   Wouldn't this make knowledge 
both
true and false?  And this morning I read that Feyerbend called the laws of 
formal logic naive.  
Margolis says much about adding Indeterminate to the bipolar truth-values: True 
or False, but
I'm finding his book very difficult because he mentions dozens of philosophers 
(briefly stating 
their argument) I have never heard of, and who seem to have some professional 
stake in 
this game.  But I wonder that DQ is present in every event and it is 
indeterminate.  Hmmm.   



Marsha






On Jan 2, 2010, at 4:44 AM, Ian Glendinning wrote:

> Nice one Matt,
> 
> I'd seen tha ambiguity on the measure / rationality aspect before but
> not the things / experience side of it. Very interesting.
> 
> Ian
> 
> On Fri, Jan 1, 2010 at 12:43 AM, Matt Kundert
> <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> I ran across something interesting today.  I didn't realize this, but 
>> Protagoras' famous aphorism "Man is the measure of all things..." has an 
>> ambiguity in the English (at least for amateurs who only read translations 
>> and dabble in Greek words).
>> 
>> I'd always assumed that what standardly gets translated as "measure" was 
>> related to the Latin "ratio," and that old saw about how "reason" and 
>> mathematical "measuring" are ancient relations. etc.  Well, the Latin 
>> "ratio" is the translation of "logos," which all us amateurs recognize as 
>> one of the more famous Greek words: reason, thought, account, measure, word, 
>> etc.
>> 
>> The Greek word translated as "measure" in Protagoras' aphorism is _not_ 
>> Logos, but
>> 
>> Metron
>> 
>> "Metro" in modern Greek is still "measure."  However, what I ran across 
>> which made much of what the actual Greek word is was an alternative 
>> translation by Mario Untersteiner (often considered a renegade scholar by 
>> respected Anglophones I've run across), who wrote a book on the Sophists 
>> that is almost impossible to find in English for under $50 (been out of 
>> print for half a century):
>> 
>> "Man is the master of all experiences..."
>> 
>> I have no bead on what Greek word (or phrase) "things" or "experiences" 
>> translates.  All I can identify is "metron" and "anthropos" (the 
>> gender-neutral "man").  But I imagine "experiences" sounds even better to 
>> Pirsigians, whatever one might think of "measure vs. master."
>> 
>> Matt
>> 
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