Bad Statistics http://j.mp/10Szndc
@Meaningness OK, on rereading 3.1 and thinking about it, I feel comfortable dismissing the entire paper vigorously now.
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@St_Rev The idea that you can count ideas is absurd, though, and ought to have made him reconsider. -
@Meaningness You can list every idea that can be expressed in a given language, but not in a helpful way, & list won't be finite. -
@St_Rev Except ideas don’t correspond to sentences. How many ideas are in his para 3.1? Which are they? No two readers would agree. -
@Meaningness That's why I said 'can be expressed'. Could perhaps argue that expressible ideas are dense in the set of ideas, like Q in R. -
@St_Rev Maybe… experience has been that actually trying to turn English into FOPC fails for anything non-trivial. Even for math papers. -
@Meaningness Fails in any practical way, anyway. But I'm just thinking of literally counting possible ordinary-language arguments. -
@St_Rev Yeah but two different sentences can express “the same idea”; but people won’t agree on how similar they have to be to count as same -
@Meaningness Yeah, there isn't a well-defined version of convergence & equivalence. But to me that says 'same idea' isn't fully meaningful. - 1 more reply
New conversation -
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@St_Rev Unfortunately, this is as good as analytic metaphysics gets. van Inwagen is wrong about everything, but thinks unusually clearly. - End of conversation
New conversation -
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. Banned in Sweden. SubGenius, Zhuangist, white-hat troll. Defrocked mathematician. Brain problems.