TRUTH AND ETHICS IN ARGUMENT In my quest to cleanse libertarianism of platonism,

TRUTH AND ETHICS IN ARGUMENT

In my quest to cleanse libertarianism of platonism, and possibly put at least one nail in the coffin of Postmodern thought, Ive come up with two avenues of argument :

1) Operational language: Operational language (action) forces us to distinguish between platonic and real. The moment something must be described as actions, it becomes scientific. If it is not described as actions, and observable actions, then it’s not. It’s fantasy. (Platonic)

2) Ethics: I am pretty sure the requirement to speak in operational language is not a matter of ‘truth’ but of ‘ethics’. In other words, its unethical not to speak in operational language, precisely because it allows us to confuse the platonic and the real. This approach is consistent with the ETHICAL constraint libertarians demonstrate as a preference: the visibility of voluntary and involuntary transfers.

It is much easier to argue using BOTH of these lines of argument at the same time. Mathematical and logical platonists can have their cake imaginary cake, but they can’t actually eat it. Because if you use mathematical and logical platonism to cross the line into economics and politics, you’re now a crook. Worse, you’re advocating thievery.

In this case, the first platonic argument that I want to kill off is the constraint that ‘magical numbers’ (infinity) and magical sets ‘infinite sets’, place constraints on theories. (They don’t) Semantic ally meaningful combinations open to sympathetic testing are very low in number. And as I’ve said elsewhere, our problem in the construction of theories is one of words, but cognitive bias, instrumentation and measurement.

Kenneth Allen Hopf has helped me with this argument, by positioning Popper’s advice as moral, or perhaps more narrowly, ethical. Just as, I would argue, is Nassim Taleb’s improvement on Popper, and Poincaire, and perhaps those of Mandelbrot as well.

This school of thought is called ‘finitism’ in mathematics. The finitist movement stalled with Russell, Cantor and set theory, at which point it became impossible without using operational language, to prove finitism. So mathematical and set theory today is platonic. Most mathematicians and logisticians are platonists.

Of course, I’m working on moral and ethical theory, because any political system must rely upon some ethical basis, or it’s not logical to discuss ‘politics’ (persuasion) – it’s just engineering of human beings as if they’re cattle.