maybe we ignorami who are less familiar (or unfamiliar) with Frege, Quine, or Churchland could benefit.
------------- Since I just got through re-studying part of this problem for an unrelated reason, and I feel like taking the question seriously here goes. There are two problems. The first is the problem of induction, but I doubt that is what Frege, Quine or Churchland refer to. They worked at least at some one a variety of deductive problems. These can be modeled on the liar's paradox which leads to a contradiction in the formation of definitions. Example. This statement is false. (A) The problem is ancient and comes from Aristotle's version of logic: 1). All (A) is (B). The contradiction is 2.) Some (A) is (B) ergo some (A) is not (B). That was the original intent and non-problematic formation. Two problems. If (A) is empty then (B) is empty. But if we assume that (B) is not empty, then (A) can not be empty. This is known as the existence problem. There are variety of problems already present. It's very tedious to go through them, and I can likely get it wrong so look it up under Liar's Paradox, and then read about the Existence problem. The problem with Induction made Hume famous. His argument was that we call A cause and B effect and we assume they are connected. But we have no basis for that `connection'. What we have called a connection is an association: B follows from A, really means that we associate B with A with no more necessity than habit. Russell made himself partly famous by employing the inductive method to exhausion: each association makes it increasingly probable that A is the cause of B. The association by iteration can be carried on to the Limit -> Inf . This leads to the problem of the Continuum hyposthesis. Logic is riddled with problems of formation and unresolvable contradictions, all within its own universe of discourse. It's actually important to know some of this. For example the applications of probability are built on Russell's argument. Associated or correlated results are not in principle a statement of cause. But the greater the sample the more likely there is more than just an association. This is the technical reason for having very large experimental samples. If you look up the liar's paradox you will find: One version of the liar paradox is attributed to the Greek philosopher Eubulides of Miletus who lived in the 4th century BC. Eubulides reportedly asked, "A man says that he is lying. Is what he says true or false?" Which is the joke behind Ian's list name. CG So much for Phil 1A. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
