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Hal

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Everything posted by Hal

  1. No, he was trying to show that the axioms Frege gave in his original formulation of set theory (now known as 'naive set theory') led to a formal contradiction. Russell did come up with such a theory to make the infinite regress managable; this is the topic of his Principia Mathematica, and is generally known as the theory of types. However, he didnt just assume that a set shouldnt refer to itself, his solution was far more complex. To simplify greatly, he broke sets up into different 'levels'. Individual objects are level 0. Then sets of individual objects are level 1. Sets of sets of individual objects are level 2. Sets of sets of sets of individual objects are level 3, and so on. Then, he said that sets could only contain objects from the level below them. So a level 2 set could only contain level 1 sets - it wouldnt be allowed to contain itself since it was level 2, and so on. As a result, no set can contain themselves, and Russell's Paradox cannot be formulated. The point of all this was to try and show that mathematics could be derived directly from formal logic. The naive theory of sets can be given a purely logical description, hence if mathematics can be derived from sets alone, then it becomes a matter of pure logic. This enterprise is generally considered to have failed, since deriving mathematics from logic using Russells theory of types requires the postulation of axioms that arent purely logical (eg, he needs an axiom that allows sets to be casted to lower types, and an axiom of infinity that posulates the existence of infinite sets, and so on). You cant really compare Rand's theory of concepts to the Frege/Russell theory of sets. One is essentially a psychological theory, whereas the other is one of formal logic - the problems which they are both trying to address occur in completely different domains. Russell did have a tendancy to reify sets and there was a period where his whole epistemology/metaphysics was based on set theory (physical objects are identified with classes of sense impressions etc), but set theory itself is purely formal.
  2. Where is the evidence that Rand's claims about males and females are universal, rather than specific to the culture she grew up in? Its not 'Marxist' to note that different societies have differing conceptions of femininity and masculinity, its a basic fact which even a cursory excursion into the literature of anthropology will confirm.
  3. Why do you think that your personal experiences, based as they are on one particular society at one particular point in history, are philosophically relevant when it comes to discussing the nature of men/women? Someone who lived in the 18th century could use "logic and the evidence of his senses" to come to the conclusion that it was in the essence of black people to be servile. And this would be flawed for precisely the same reasons as your argument - you cannot make meaningful extrapolations from such a small sample. The fact that until recently women have generally been servile in modern society is interesting, but this tells us very little about the 'objective nature of feminity', and quite a lot about the structure and history of our culture.
  4. Not cracking down on copyright infringement could be an example; perhaps someone running a specialised small business would want to use some (expensive) industry-standard software which his equally sized competitors were pirating. There are probably lots of other examples. We dont have to talk about 'big crimes' like allowing credit card fraud here; consider situations where the government turns a blind-eye to companies flouting smaller scale laws(eg hygene regulation, etc)
  5. If your competitors are receiving subsidies while you arent, then not much. To the OP: I think theres a strong case for arguing this would fall under the same principle as receiving state-funded education; namely its moral iff the actions of the state have artificially restricted your options, and you denounce it while taking it. Someone who actively sought handouts in order to gain an advantage over their competitors would be acting immorally, but I dont think you can blame someone for accepting handouts if he worked in an industry where this was the norm - not doing so would give his competitors an unfair advantage, and theres no reason why he should martyr himself. Thats not to say that he necessarily should take handouts - it would really be a matter of personal choice. Some people might have such a strong aversion to stolen money that they wouldnt be happy accepting it even in circumstances where doing so would be justifiable, and theres nothing wrong with that either.
  6. To be honest, your boyfriend suggesting that you read 1000 page books in order to understand your relationship sounds a bit... odd. Obviously a lot of people have been strongly influenced by AR's novels, myself included, but I think theres a line between appreciation and obsession. Personally I think you'd be best asking him to explain the problems/issues in his own words, rather than trying to communicate through a mouthpiece. edit: Thats not to say that you shouldnt read Atlas Shrugged (you should, its great), just that I dont think you should do so primarilly to help with your relationship.
  7. No, because a) people would just pirate the Microsoft products they wanted if they werent being sold in the shops, and Apple/Sony would lose sales and hence profit if they withdrew from the country (and the gap in the market would be filled by people importing Apple/Sony products from other countries and selling them in France). You cant really withdraw from a country in a global economy, especially if you are primarilly selling intellectual property. Trade doesnt work like that.
  8. I know nothing about education or developmental psychology, however: This seems wrong, and it conflicts with my intuitions, which are admittedly based on nothing. However, I would have thought that although teaching phonics is important, it should be combined with more holistic methods - ie there should be a mixture of both, where children are taught individual sounds, while also gaining familiarity with words as whole units. My reasoning for this stems from that fact that I've found as an adult that most things are best learned via a combination of reductionist and holistic approaches, rather than focusing exclusively on one or the other (two examples: Maths and Go). Is there any actual research which suggests sticking exclusively to one method is best for teaching reading? I would have thought most children would get bored senseless having to constantly drill letter sounds without actually geting to practice their reading (it would be like teaching someone how to play chess by getting him to solve hundreds of isolated chess problems, rather than playing any full games. Or teaching someone to play the guitar by repeatedly going over individual chords, rather than trying to play full songs). edit Thats actually one of the worst arguments I've heard for weeks
  9. I'm not 100% sure what you mean, but I dont think many supporters of evolution would deny that the individual subatomic particles which constituted the living things at each stage of the evolutionary process all acted in accordance with the laws of physics. Hence I think that they would genearlly agree that evolution is, in a sense, emergent from a set of more basic laws (ie, its a higher level theory than those of pure physics).
  10. Dont you live in some heathen European country though? I doubt you could grow up in Britain and not know it was about Jesus, and I assume America is far worse.
  11. It is tradtionally a Christian holiday. However, by 'history'/'tradition' here I do not mean ~1500 years ago. Eid is generally taken to be short for "Eid ul-Fitr" (your first one). All the Muslims I know normally just call it 'Eid' anyway.
  12. I disagree. When youre looking for the essentials of a holiday, going back ~1500 years isnt very useful. Christmas has been primarilly Christian until very recently (less than 100 years), and even today, it has obvious connotations with Christianity. I was under the impression that despite not having a fixed date Eid still always occurred around November, but apparently I'm wrong.
  13. A law which had to have the context it was formulated in taken into account wouldnt be 'universal'. A universal law, by definition, applies everywhere, at all times (eg the Kantian categoral imperiative)
  14. Contextualism in Objectivist ethics is essentially the claim that you cant formulate timeless universal moral laws like "Killing is Wrong"; you have to form your judgements based on the details of the specific situation at hand (contrast this with the absolutism of Christian or Kantian moral philosophy to see the difference). This doesnt, however, imply that all possible judgements of a particular situation are equivalent, which is what your friend seems to be using 'contextualism' to mean.
  15. I think Eid normally occurs around that time (give or take a month or so). This seems like a strange comment though; do you have a problem with Jews celebrating Hanukkah rather than Christmas as their primary winter festival? (assuming that this is primarilly an argument about minorities who dont accept the traditions of the dominant culture). Christmas is a historically Christian holiday, so it would be understandable if members of other religions wanted to have nothing to do with it. This isnt related to the Kwaanza thing though, since thats an issue of race rather than religion. A Muslim 'version' of Christmas would make a lot more sense than a black version.
  16. This isnt really relevant. We arent building new cities out of lego bricks, we're talking about how we could move to a free-market economy from where we currently are. Regardless of what created the problem, it is a problem nonetheless. Yes. And this is exactly what would happen if the government were to sell off the road network. Assuming we could somehow move to a system where this was in place, how would you handle people who wished to charge others for using their roads? Youre going to have a situation where every single road in the city is owned by a different group of people, and theres a toll booth on every corner. And of course, the people who owned the roads right in the center of the city would be able to charge pretty much whatever they liked. I think this suffers from the same 'lego brick' problem I mentioned above; its a solution designed to fit a new country which we are building from scratch, not one for the existing world. In order to make the transition from the current system to a free-market, the roads we have would have to be sold, and there is quite literally not enough money in the world to buy the road network in central London, or the Underground subway. I think the account you gave in that blog post fails to appreciate the scale of the problem - a company which owned the transportation network could do whatever it wanted, and it would almost certainly be the most powerful company in the world. It would have the potential to pretty much collapse the global economy single-handedly just by denying people access to the City. It would be able to charge the companies based in central London pretty much any fee it wanted, under the threat of shutting down the roads for a week or so, which would cause wide-scale bankruptices along with the complete destruction of the UK's financial system. The same would apply to the controllers of the transportation networks in any other major city, such as New York or Tokyo. The only way a privately owned road network would be mangable would be if it were heavily regulated by the government, with laws in place which prevented them from shutting down the system. And in case the 'privitization' is really just a facade, since its still essentially state-controlled. edit: I want to clarify; I'm not talking about interstate highways or the like here. If a company wants to go out and build a huge freeway connecting 2 states then good luck to them, and they are certainly free to charge whatever they like for the use of their new roads. I'm talking specifically about the transportation networks which already exist in major cities, and are essential to their functioning and existence.
  17. I had no idea that anyone other than Irish Loyalists considered St Patrick's day a religious holiday; everyone I know that celebrates it does so because they like Ireland, not because they view it being a Catholic festival. However, you could still argue that its collectivist, since its essentailly a nationalist holiday. I personally find the "Lets all love Ireland! Arent Irish people quirky and fun?!" mentality to be fairly distasteful, albeit less so than African-American pride. But then again, I find most displays of patriotism distasteful; I think growing up in Scotland put me off it for life :/ St Patricks day is a Catholic holiday in the same sense that Chistmas and Easter are. Historically they may have been born out of religion, but that isnt the reason most people celebrate them today. For all intents and purposes, they are secular.
  18. Everyone who wants to live in the society, since we're talking exclusively about things which are essential to the functioning of a modern country. There is a principle, and I basically stated it in the above post. For natural monopolies which are essential to the functioning of the country, and where competition is pretty much impossible due to the nature of the service in question, I think government ownership is justified. The specific example I used, road networks, are probably the paradigm case of this; how could you possibly have private ownership of the roads, or the subway system, in New York City? edit: the fire service is another decent example, although not quite as good because I suppose it might be hypothetically possible that a city could maybe exist with a fully private fire service
  19. I think there are other things which it might be better if the government owned; the road network would be an obvious example, along with other natural monopolies where talking about competition doesnt make any sense (telephone networks?). Obviously this shouldnt be funded via coersive taxation, but if we can assume donations would suffice to fund the military, we can assume theyd cover these sorts of things too. edit: usage fees would also help. Charging motorists a yearly flat fee to use government owned roads strikes me as reasonable (especially compared to the alternative of having a toll booth on every corner, which really isnt an option in a busy city like New York or London), and telephone networks could be funded by a slightly increased call cost, and so on.
  20. Isnt the motives/consequences dichotomy essentailly present in Objectivist ethics in the form of "errors of knowledge vs moral failings"? The point of making a distinction between motives and consequences is to avoid condeming people where their limited knowledge of a sitution results in them performing an action which, while morally correct within the (incomplete) context of their knowledge, they would not have performed if they had access to all the relevant facts. For instance, a person who votes for politician X because he has good grounds for believing that X will be a good President shouldnt morally blamed if politician X turns out to be secretly corrupt in a way which the person couldnt have predicted (didnt AR support Nixon?). Here we would say that the person's motives were faultless, even though his actions had undesirable consequences. Or to translate into Objectivese, the person acted correctly within the context of their knowledge - their failing was one of knowledge, not of morality. And a person who evaluates another is acting with the correct motives - his goal is to treat everyone the way they deserve to be treated. However, it is possible for his evaluation to be wrong if he does not have access to all the facts; eg if the person he is evaluating is good at hiding his more unsavoury characteristics. And in this case, some sort of distinction will have to be made between this evaluation which was incorrect due to lack of knowledge, and an evaluation which was incorrect because of either the moral premises of the evaluater, or evasion. And this is essentially equivalent to motives vs consequences.
  21. JASKN, I think you should reply to this post by software_nerd. You are correct that if someone is happy, then there is no meaningful standpoint from which to condemn him. But what leads you to believe people living the sort of lifestyles you mention are normally happy? A drug user who enjoys taking coke or mdma when he goes out clubbing may lead a happy life, but this is neither an example of addiction nor hedonism. You cant generalise from this to the claim that (eg) most heroin addicts are content with their lives without a _lot_ more evidence/arguments. Similarly, someone who enjoys having sex with attractive women may lead an enjoyable life, but you cant generalise from this to the claim that most playboys who only live for sex are also likely to be happy. There is no valid inference from "x is enjoyable as part of an otherwise fufilling life" to "x will make someone happy if they pursue it as a primary goal".
  22. I would say that similarity judgement necessarily involves categorisation - I think that seeing an object 'as a kind of something' is largely a similarity judgement (what else could it be?). I identify my television as a television partly because of certain resemblances it has to other televisions that I've seen. Then what is the difference? What is being remembered here? If a concept is just a bunch of percepts that are retained, then it seems that remembering percepts for the purposes of similarity judgements is necessarily conceptual. This is pretty much the same as neural networks (and other methods of supervised machine learning). The AI forms some classification scheme, and the supervisor checks to see if its formed the right one (see my above example about tanks in forests). Yes it is. The technical name term for this is 'unsupervised learning' (ie categorising observations without being explicitly guided as to what categorisations to make).
  23. "The US invaded Iraq because they honestly believed that they possessed weapons of mass destruction" theory seems fairly loony to me. The "Halliburton-pipeline in Afghanistan" idea was pretty silly, but I thnk people were just trying to come up with a possible explanation why the US invaded, since it was probably the most pointless and unmotivated war in recent history. I've still not seen anyone come up with a plausible explanation of why it happened. edit: I think the "it was a missile that hit the pentagon, not a plane" claim is probably the craziest recent popular conspiracy theory.
  24. In my experience, libertarians who argue against anarchy generally use either the same standard arguments that Ayn Rand used in her essay in VoS, or the more sophisticated ones given by Robert Nozick in ASU. Of course the primary objection to anarcho-capitalism is that it simply couldnt work, and I think pretty much everyone other than the anarchists are agreed on that.
  25. I thought the claim was that the Libertarians (capital 'L', denoting the Libertarian political party in America) contained a lot of anarcho-capitalists, not that all libertarians (small l, meaning anyone with minarchist/classical liberal beliefs, including Objectivists) were anarchists? Small-l libertarian philosophers like Robert Nozick obviously arent anarchists. The small-l/big-L distinction is quite important here, since not all libertarians support the Libertarian party. There are several I know who oppose it due its perceived lack of direction, and stance on foreign policy.
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