“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Thursday, December 29, 2011

Some Cool and Not Cool Stuff that Michael Dummett Said

[T]he class of true sentences is the class the utterance of a member of which a speaker of the language is aiming at when he employs what is recognizably the assertoric use. [COOL: truth telling is like winning a game]

[O]nce a system has been formulated, we can, by reference to it, define new properties not expressible in it, such as the property of being a true statement in the system; hence, by applying induction to such new properties, we can arrive at conclusions not provable in it. [NOT COOL: Gödel makes this impossible]




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