Source: Facebook

OPERATIONALISM: GRAMMARS INSTEAD OF LOGICS – ITS LIKE CHEMISTRY VS BIOLOGY – PART 1

So, in the end, the investigation into logic has been another distraction, just like religion, like rationalism, like Marx/Freud/Boaz/Cantor/Rothbard pseudoscience.

What does LOGIC mean? It means the preservation of continuous relations across statements, sentences, arguments, stories.

For example, the supposedly profound power of mathematics, is that by consisting of nothing other than positional names, all operations preserve both continuous relations and scale independence.

What differences can the human mind percieve? pretty much everything we can reduce to an analogy to experience.

What are the limits of those differences? well, they are probably in the vicinity of three to five ‘cases’. Since that seems to be about the limit of the mind.

So reality consists of only so many differences available to our senses. In this ‘sense’ a color wheel presents a logic and our color senses are seeking the same harmonic as our auditory senses.

But when we come to language we encounter the problem of serialization, and the reduction of our thought to symbolic sounds which can then be used to reconstruct thoughts from those symbols, with the difference being the set of excitements of memory(thought), impulse(physical-motion) and emotion(hormonal) produced by those symbols.

And just as our minds use similarities and differences in iterations to produce possibilities that we can then select from and focus on thereby causing recursion; and just as we can discuss the hierarch of sets of externalities caused by interactions of the fundamental forces of the universe: subatomic, atomic, chemical, biological, sentient, rational; then we can also produce that externality (consequences) we call language, to iteratively accumulate associations which as a consequence communicate similar experiences (transfers of meaning).

Now, reality consists of only so many actionable dimensions, and human sense perception and reason are capable of only so many actionable dimensions. But we can use many tools both physical and mental to reduce complexity to some sort of analogy to experience, just as we produce languages as analogy to experience.

And we can speak in a spectrum of grammars.

1) We can speak in natural (“Ordinary”) grammars which of necessity of constant relations, which include experiences.

2) We can speak in inflationary natural grammars of inflation such as storytelling, idealisms, or conflating them into mysticisms, and the occult. Now, we can use storytelling (moral fictionalisms) without question. It’s our primary form of pedagogy. We we can also use pseudoscientific fictionalisms (magic), ideal fictionalisms (philosophy and logic), and supernatural fictionalisms (mythology) or we can conflate all of themtogether producing supernatural religions.

3) We can speak in deflationary grammars, such as differences, sets, arithmetic, accounting, mathematics, computation, calculations(reasoning), and algorithms, programs(models, simulations), recipes (human actions required), reasoning, and testimony.

So we can move from normal experiential but non-inflationary discourse, to inflationary and conflationary grammars, to deflationary grammars to dimensional grammars on the other. ( the old fashioned terminology might be analytic, ordinary, and synthetic, but I use operational definitions for reasons of deflation.)

But, as we move from deflated grammars (differences, sets, mathematics) to deflationary, to ordinary experiential, to fictional, to inflationary, to fictionalism, to outright lying, we start with removing all information to purely imaginary information.And each of these grammars implies a set of rules of semantics (information) as well as syntax.

And these semantic and syntactical grammars are available in every human language, because these grammars express increasing dimensions of human expressionary possibility from the purely necessary continuous relations of similarities and differences to the arbitrary relations of our free associations in dream states.

So I tend to express ‘logic’ as the semantics and syntax of constant relations of any number of dimensions. Or in general, an internally consistent grammar of constant relations in an increasingly number of dimensions – where a dimension refers to any set of constant relations preserved in relation to any other set of constant relations. And I do that to operationally transform this word ‘logic’ into its scientific (operational) definition.

As such, if we constrain our semantics and our syntax to the maximum grammar that is not inflationary, but that is commensurable across all peoples, at least ‘marginally indifferent’ if not identical then we can produce statements that are expressed in as concrete a grammar as mathematics. Such a grammar requires, as does any grammar of any deflated dimension, a constraint of semantics to that dimension, well formed transactions meaning syntactically complete and testable statements.

So just as a programming language limits its syntax and its types, as well as its semantics. and just as mathematics limits its semantics to positional names, we can limit our syntax and semantics to a set of relations that are constant between human beings, and are existentially possible, and demonstrable.

That semantics is ‘actions’, since actions must be brought into existence in a sequence in real time. And all actions can be described in human language. And anything that cannot be described as an action cannot be brought into existence.

Now this gets us to the point where we have to describe the difference between proof and truth, and justification and survival.

(more….)