RAYBRO%HOLON@UTRCGW.UTC.COM ("William R Brohinsky", ay) (06/19/91)
I'm sorry, but I've lost my taste for this discussion. This is what did it to me: I am teaching a course in C. (Two of them, actually, and this happened after the thursday class, which is six lessons behind the tuesday class). I was accosted after the first `overview' class by one of the matrons from our library, who demanded of me whether boolean IF/THENs could be related to the IF/THENs of philosophical logic. I've never liked philosophical logic, primarily because it is not logical. (Please, save the flames, this is IMHO!) I spent more time (almost half an hour) trying to convince this woman to abandon her agenda and accept that programming languages are utterly uninterested in philosophy (although programmers themselves may be more than interested) and that a simple acceptance of Boolean tables as a guide will get her through the course just fine, thank you. This is the kind of religious discussion that brookes no form of humor, and I can't deal with that. As for our discussion of THEN, and it's place alongside the price of tea in China as a Really Hot Item, maybe I'm getting oversensitive, but I see the same kind of humorless heavy-handedness starting to appear. I counsel a strong dose of Gracie Allen for anyone who feels that this discussion is of earth-shaking importance (Available at fine spoken-recording purveyors everywhere, usually buffered with some George Burns additive). raybro
vandys@sequent.com (Andrew Valencia) (06/20/91)
RAYBRO%HOLON@UTRCGW.UTC.COM ("William R Brohinsky", ay) writes: >I've never liked philosophical logic, primarily because it is not logical. >(Please, save the flames, this is IMHO!) I spent more time (almost half >an hour) trying to convince this woman to abandon her agenda and accept >that programming languages are utterly uninterested in philosophy Actually, UC Berkeley has a Logic and Methodology course of study which does a pretty good job of applying the rigor of predicate calculus and metalogic to some hairy problems in philosophy. The people coming out of that program seem to do equally well in both the math and "classic" philosophy fields. Something we seem to have forgotten is that thinking well is a valuable activity no matter what field it's applied to. Andy Valencia vandys@sequent.com