Toby Meadows

in his comments wrt AT on this stuff.

But that's just explaining my comment above.

You are saying something more general and interesting.

What you are saying makes sense to me.

I also agree that the "practicality" move is doing a lot of heavy lifting and that it's often unsatisfying, if not, baffling.

But for many philosophical projects, I don't think, eg, the liar paradox is important.

I felt that TW was drawing a long bow

Yes and no.

I'm not saying these problems aren't worth investigating. I've spent a lot of time in these corners.

But do generalist (particularly pragmatist) philosophers need to have perfect takes on them?

No. The problems can be largely cordoned off without affecting the overall position.

In which I prove something that was obviously true, but it takes a while and is quite fun.

Moschovakis's work on an algorithmic theory of intensions is depressingly almost unknown in philosophy but imo the most serious (still flawed) work that has been done in this space.

Haven't thought about this in a long while, but I think the intensional aspects of property theory make it much harder to theorize and even harder to pick out a winner among alternative theories.

Church's interesting but messy work on intensional logic makes for an interesting parallel.

If property talk was sufficiently urgent (it's not) we could do something similar with it.

But I do agree that these things are far from trivial to address. Generalists like TW should probably avoid diving into these weeds lest they get out of their depth.

Ha!

I never like siding with big W.

Unlike W iirc I'm not trying to say serious stuff isn't going on there, but I think it's also obvious that eg Tarski gave us a very serviceable theory of truth that we understand well enough to avoid the nasty places.

It's also no coincidence that properties have enjoyed less attention than sets or truth.

Outside the stuffy halls of Oxford and some ivy clad buildings on the east coast of the US, talk of properties isn't remarkably useful.

Sure, but I think a pragmatist would generally be within their rights to walk around such trash fires.

It's not like any of them have anything like deep consensus solutions. But we do know how to get most of what we want from these theories.

To be clear, I think there could be interesting things to do in this space.

But I think bringing this stuff up in a review is churlish and daft.

TW is far from an expert at that stuff anyway.

I think you're wrong.

Easy set theory and easy truth theory seem to work just fine from a practical perspective.

There are a few references to examples from phil phys later in the paper.

I don't think it's a refusal to engage so much as a complete mismatch in expectations about what philosophy is supposed to do.

He thinks of acquiring more true propositions as the goal. So given her claim is trivially true there is nothing more she can do that is of philosophical interest.

Can The Classical Ladder Be Kicked Away? The View from One Rung Up - Journal of Philosophical Logic Nonclassical logicians often justify their use of classical logic in their metatheoretic reasoning as, to put things in Bob Meyer’s evocative phrasing, “preaching in Classicalese to the Classicalists”...

"Can The Classical Ladder Be Kicked Away? The View from One Rung Up" by @rohanfrench.bsky.social

link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Tbf Michael Dummett did a lot of intuitionistic logic while also doing more than continental philosophers to improve the lives of refugees by simply doing something rather than nothing.

I think I'd find it easier to switch to Dvorak than switch pinkies for latex.

I got used to the UK layout when I lived there ... \ at the bottom left ... and now I have to order keyboards from the UK or I go insane.

Boo!

bsky.app/profile/arxi...

Finally a draft!

bsky.app/profile/arxi...

Any theorem expressible in the language in analysis will be true in an elementary extension of the standard model.

Nonstandard analysis is not my jam, but this is just a logic thing.

It will be if that extension is an elementary extension, which is the usual thing.

Can't remember.

Off the cuff I'd think of Boolos's example, "Some critics only admire each other."

This purportedly requires plural quantification for a natural analysis.

Perhaps this has no obvious translation into Japanese?

You know more linguistics than me so I won't keep embarrassing myself.

My faves in this zone are akaik (which isn't much):

- the definite article (not in Polish, sorry Russell); and

- plural quantification (not in Japanese).

Grateful to those people who explained this to me.

I remain in awe of people who come to academia and can work in English when it isn't their first language. It's mind blowing.

I suppose the thing I'm wondering is if they ever were able to explain their research in their native language.

Philosophy is full of useful jargon we use to make fine distinctions etc. I think we keep acquiring more of this language as we go.

Why expect that to translate back?

This will also happen with bike repair.

Meh ...

Must do better!

An amusing part of this unamusing situation is that the proposed example is about currency.

As such, it makes no use whatsoever of whatever spooky "natural properties" are possessed by gold.

You might as well use fools' gold. Or paper. It doesn't really matter.

Just like metaphysics.