Tuesday, May 29, 2012

the yellowjackets of logic

Ahut Ni-Alt'chierrjue of Tisthelpoint has this to say about being shackled by logical systems: “ If you look at, say, Nialveron Tissery or, perhaps, Tehutbort Scogginsky, you see the same kind of spread of reasoning: the logics that they purport are absolutely true under all circumstances are in fact a kind of sham, but it's a sham that is opaque to Nialveron and Tehutbort. Their logics -- Nialveron promotes something called "Or-reductive intersemantic logic", whereas Tehutbort promotes "Provably Exact Linear Binarity logic" -- the specifics of each, the formula redexes and so forth, aren't really important. Each of them has decided to adopt a certain way of thinking in which every term, every semantic atom has a precise and unambiguous meaning across all entities, and that only by reasoning in a deductive and exact way about these unambiguous meanings may truth about the world be discovered. While I and others laud the charge towards descriptive empiricism that Nialveron and Tehutbort are making, we have deep qualms about the tendencies of Nialveron and Tehutbort's arguments to build up into a sort of prescriptivity -- that is, they assume that because the linguistic correctness of logic appears to transcend circumstance, therefore, the formulas of logic must somehow be necessitated prior to the existence of the universe: for them the universe is some kind of accidental distraction to an absolute sparkling crystalline gem of exact and precise Deific Logical Organization, and must always give way to the DLO when there are contentious matters.

But the most troubling aspect of this prescriptivity is the way that it straitjackets their thinking. Outside of the rather ascetic intellectual climes that Nialveron and Tehutbort are known to inhabit, they are considered to be exceptionally uncreative and unoriginal thinkers. They do not imagine. They do not visualize and engineer new worlds: they spend their time taking the world as is and stuffing it into as many squarelike boxes as possible, and then they assume that their system of squarelike boxes is somehow antecedant to their entire sensorium. Tehutbort is known to have accosted a snail who fell off a log: he said "that is impossible by Noxeuse's Divisibility Paradox", and to have then put the snail back on the log because it falling off the log wasn't in accordance to his world view.

My half-sister Tiemthdgmie, the metal plasma-carver usually starts laughing at this point. She is known to have said "While it's true that when I carve statues the exact positions of the metal must obey statics laws or the statue will fall apart, those laws are orthogonal to the artistic vision of the statue -- which cares not a whit for any so called physics" ”

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