OPERATIONALISM, TRUTH AND HONESTY (a little deep for FB, but worth reading) (sho

OPERATIONALISM, TRUTH AND HONESTY

(a little deep for FB, but worth reading) (should be getting easier to understand)

I’m going to ‘correct’ this statement by Brouwer, and say that the (law of the excluded middle) LEM was abstracted from contexts of correspondent precision, to general statements, independent of context and therefore of arbitrary precision. (The same criticism applies to the AOC: axiom of choice.)

—“Intuitionistic logic can be succinctly described as classical logic without the Aristotelian law of excluded middle (LEM): (A ∨ ¬A) or the classical law of double negation elimination (¬ ¬A → A), but with the law of contradiction (A → B) → ((A → ¬B) → ¬A) and ex falso quodlibet: (¬A → (A → B)). Brouwer [1908] observed that LEM was abstracted from finite situations, then extended without justification to statements about infinite collections.”— S.E.P.

The fact that these philosophers and mathematicians failed to see the implication of their work on intuitionism and operationalism as one of arbitrary precision, is as humorous or ironic, as it is that advocates of praxeology (operationalism in economics) rely passionately on apriorism. In hindsight (since I only intuited this problem and did not immediately understand it) this is all absurdly obvious. But the work to remove ‘spiritual and platonistic’ language from our vocabulary and our thoughts is still in need of a great deal of work. As an Operationalist, when I hear people rely upon Continental and Cosmopolitan arguments, I hear exactly what an atheist hears when he listens to religious arguments: really weak and ill founded analogy and nothing more.

The insight that we find from studying the loss of precision (context) in the construction of general rules in mathematics, and therefore the loss of LEM and AOC, can be applied to economics, where we lost constant relations. We can no longer predict constant relations out of a causally dense, kaleidic system, open to black swans. But that does not prevent us from using analysis of events to describe general cases, and from those general cases, attempt to state those cases in operational language. And once stated in operational language to determine whether or not they possess the status of laws (subject to manipulation, shocks and black swans, but as general rules, subject to the limits of non-contradiction).

In my attempt to reform ethics and politics, I am fighting an extraordinarily difficult battle that essentially boils down to ‘your linguistic conveniences and contrivances, which provide such utility, and as such which you understand as knowledge of use, are, like religious analogies, producers of profound social and economic external consequences, because those analogies are as devoid of knowledge of construction as are religious arguments.”

Math works. Religion ‘works’ too. That something ‘works’ does not mean you understand its construction, or the external consequences of your employment of analogy rather than description. That mathematics, other than the natural numbers, consists entirely of functions, not numbers, is a matter of convention, not reality.

if you cannot state something in operational language you do not understand it. If you do not understand it you cannot make truth claims about it. Its impossible. Period. You can state an hypothesis. But you cannot claim it is true. And once aware of this fact, you cannot claim you are making an honest statement either.

This is the insight that I want to bring to praxeology and economics. To restore ethics and morality to economics and politics by the requirement for operational language. To require fully informed, warrantied, productive, voluntary exchange free of negative externality (free riding), rather than the construction of laws (commands), constructed of moralistic deceptions.

Because cooperation is either mutually beneficial or it is parasitism, and that is a contradiction. Cooperation is either fully informed, warrantied, productive exchange free of negative externality (free riding) or it is by law of contradiction, not cooperation but parasitism, conquest, or destruction.

And one need not abandon his wealth of violence, nor refrain from violence when he is the subject of non cooperation: parasitism, conquest, or destruction.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

Kiev Ukraine.