OPERATIONAL CURE FOR MADNESS As far as I know, of the cases below, operational d

OPERATIONAL CURE FOR MADNESS

As far as I know, of the cases below, operational definitions, operational language, under e prime will make most of these sentences impossible to speak. In other words, most of the madness of philosophy (and reason) is attributable to analogies (functions) used as if they refer to objects, processes, or actions.

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Here, then, are examples of forty different ways in which thought can go irretrievably wrong, of which we can identify only the first two.

1 Between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson.

2 Between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson, and it is not the case that between 1960 and 1970 there were three US presidents named Johnson.

3 God is three persons in one substance, and one of these persons is Jesus, which is the lamb that was slain even from the foundations of the world.

4 Three lies between two and four only by a particular act of the Divine Will.

5 Three lies between two and four by a moral and spiritual necessity inherent in the nature of numbers.

6 Three lies between two and four by a natural and physical necessity inherent in the nature of numbers.

7 Three lies between two and four only by a convention which mathematicians have adopted.

8 There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed.

9 There is no number three.

10 Three is the only number.

11 Three is the highest number.

12 Three is a large number.

13 Three is a lucky number.

14 The sum of three and two is a little greater than eight.

15 Three is a real object all right: you are not thinking of nothing when you think of three.

16 Three is a real material object.

17 Three is a real spiritual object.

18 Three is an incomplete object, only now coming into existence.

19 Three is not an object at all, but an essence; not a thing, but a thought; not a particular, but a universal.

20 Three is a universal all right, but it exists only, and it exists fully, in each actual triple.

21 Actual triples possess threeness only contingently, approximately, and changeably, but three itself possesses threeness necessarily, exactly, and immutably.

22 The number three is only a mental construct after all, a convenience of thought.

23 The proposition that 3 is the fifth root of 243 is a tautology, just like ‘An oculist is an eye-doctor.’

24 The number three is that whole of which the parts are all and only the actual inscriptions of the numerals, ‘three’ or `3′.

25 Five is of the same substance as three, co-eternal with three, very three of three: it is only in their attributes that three and five are different.

26 The tie which unites the number three to its properties (such as primeness) is inexplicable.

27 The number three is nothing more than the sum of its properties and relations.

28 The number three is neither an idle Platonic universal, nor a blank Lockean substratum; it is a concrete and specific energy in things, and can be detected at work in such observable processes as combustion.

29 Three is a positive integer, and the probability of a positive integer being even is ½, so the probability of three being even is ½.

30 In some previous state of our existence we knew the number three face-to-face, as it is in itself, and by some kind of union with it.

31 How can I be absolutely sure that I am not the number three?

32 Since the properties of three are intelligible, and intelligibles can exist only in the intellect, the properties of three exist only in the intellect.

33 How is the addition of numbers possible? Nothing can make the number three into four, for example.

34 What the number three is in itself, as distinct from the phenomena which it produces in our minds, we can, of course, never know.

35 We get the concept of three only through the transcendental unity of our intuitions as being successive in time.

36 One is identity; two is difference; three is the identity of, and difference between, identity and difference.

37 The number three is not an ideal object of intellectual contemplation, but a concrete product of human praxis.

38 The unconscious significance of the number three is invariably phallic, nasal, and patriarchal.

39 The three members of any triple, being distinct from and merely related to one another, would fall helplessly asunder, if there were not some deeper non-relational unity of which their being three is only an appearance.

40 It may be – though I don’t really believe in modalities – that in some other galaxies the sum of three and two is not five, or indeed is neither five nor not five. (Don’t laugh! They laughed at Christopher Columbus, you know, and at Copernicus; and even the logical law of excluded middle is being questioned nowadays by some of the sharper young physicists.)