tim (04/11/83)
A recent article mentioned that the poster believed that the laws of logic were absolutes, and that there were likewise moral absolutes (murder is wrong, etc.) In fact, the "laws of logic" are *not* absolutes: they are arbitrary rules of productions which we find useful in establishing mathematics. It's all well and good to say "true and true is true", but it is equally easy to define a logic in which "true and true is false" or "true and true is green wombats from outer space". The laws we usually use are those which are useful to us because it is easy to see a match between them and real-world phenomena, but this matching is ill-defined and subjective. There is nothing absolute about logic, and nothing absolute about morality. Both depend on subjective decisions as to the validity of the logical or moral system. Tim P.S. No takers on my "made in the image" challenge? I'm disappointed.
hickmott (04/12/83)
What? Absolutely none? Long live Russell's paradox -Andy Hickmott decvax!yale-comix!hickmott
debray (04/14/83)
When one says "there are no absolutes", one has in mind, presumably, some sort of hierarchical organization of the domains under consideration. Principles that are absolute inside one level of this hierarchy would not be so within a higher level. For example, Euclid's fifth postulate is absolute within Euclidean geometry, but not so at the higher level of abstraction where we can have non-Euclidean geometries as well. Similarly, the invariance of mass, which is absolute in Newtonian mechanics, is no longer so in the higher level of relativistic mechanics (I call this a "higher" level because Newtonian mechanics is a special, much-lower- velocity-than-light case of relativistic mechanics). To claim that "A is absolute" without specifying the domain within which it is absolute seems to imply that it is absolute in the topmost level of such a hierarchy. This seems to presume a finite hierarchy, but it isn't obvious why one can't go on abstracting indefinitely to give an infinitely high hierarchy of this sort. For example, the law of modus ponens holds in any logic that represents the "real" world, just because our universe is structured in a particular way. However, we can (in principle, at least) abstract out over universes and postulate the existence of worlds that are fundamentally different from ours, where such a law might not hold. The fact that we cannot possibly observe any such different world does not invalidate the principle used in the abstraction process. I don't think, therefore, that unqualified statements like "X is absolute" can be defended on their own right. In the context of the above argument, a statement like "there are no absolutes" could be interpreted to refer to a process where, given any X that was absolute in a given domain, we could abstract out to a domain at a higher level where X was not absolute. Comments welcome. Saumya K Debray SUNY at Stony Brook ... allegra!sbcs!debray