WHY DIDN’T WE PREVENT CANTOR’S INFINITIES? (Ghosts?) by Propertarian Frank The e

WHY DIDN’T WE PREVENT CANTOR’S INFINITIES? (Ghosts?)

by Propertarian Frank

The exact same argument we use to stop believing in ghosts should have prevented Cantor’s infinities. But it didn’t.

(1) People familiar with Diagonal Argument and understand it is epistemic cancer.

(2) People familiar with advanced Platonist trickery like the Diagonal Argument and buy it even though they avoid falling for Platonism in other domains.

(3) People that are unfamiliar with advanced Platonist trickery, but intuitively understand truth is ultimately about actionable reality.

(4) People that are unfamiliar with advanced Platonist trickery, and believe in primitive forms of Platonism (theism, dualism).

Type (1) people will get testimonialism immediately.

Type (2) people could be persuaded. Trick is to prompt them to explain what differentiates the type of reasoning Cantor uses from the type of reasoning that tries to determine how many angels can dance simultaneously on the head of a pin. Induce cognitive dissonance by making explicit that wishful thinking is only possible when you use non-constructed names.

Type (3) people lack the information necessary to judge constructionism in philosophy of mathematics. Understanding Testimonialism requires a bare minimum of familiarity with philosophy of science. Absolute key concept is ‘decidability’. How does a type (3) person ascertain that he ‘gets’ operationalism? Through demonstration in something like the ‘line exercise’ from the other day. So, unfortunately, this type of person will miss the profundity and importance of operationalism. (Seeing the importance of operationalism was the reason I kept reading your corpus). We need to see concrete instances of a method failing so that we can eventually incorporate the solution to that failure into our epistemological method. Without the concretes, it’s impossible. Unfortunately, adding lessons on the Diagonal Argument, operationalism in psychology, instrumentalism and measurement in physics etc, would not be feasible methods for familiarizing the uninitiated. In other words, if you haven’t spent considerable time thinking about philosophy of science already, courses in Propertarianism will not convince you, because you lack the means of judging them.

Type (4) people are the hardest to persuade. You have to show them a domain in which Idealism fails, and prompt them to think about why they think it doesn’t fail in this other domain. If you can’t crush their Platonist belief in a certain domain (due to emotional blocks for instance), they can’t consistently apply operationalism. The fact that they haven’t already given up on simpler forms of Platonism indicates that they may have psychological blocks. Ergo, I think this type of person is the least amenable to learn Testimonialism through video lectures.