Symbolic languages and natural structures a mathematician's account of empiricism
Foundations of Science 10 (2) (2005)
| Abstract | The ancient dualism of a sensible and an intelligible world important in Neoplatonic and medieval philosophy, down to Descartes and Kant, would seem to be supplanted today by a scientific view of mind-in-nature. Here, we revive the old dualism in a modified form, and describe mind as a symbolic language, founded in linguistic recursive computation according to the Church-Turing thesis, constituting a world L that serves the human organism as a map of the Universe U. This methodological distinction of L vs. U helps to understand how and why structures of phenomena come to be opposed to their nature in human thought, a central topic in Heideggerian philosophy. U is uncountable according to Georg Cantor’s set theory but Language L, based on the recursive function system, is countable, and anchored in a Gray Area within U of observable phenomena, typically symbols (or tokens), prelinguistic structures, genetic-historical records of their origins. Symbols, the phenomena most familiar to mathematicians, are capable of being addressed in L-processing. The Gray Area is the human Environment E, where we can live comfortably, that we manipulate to create our niche within hostile U, with L offering overall competence of the species to survive. The human being is seen in the light of his or her linguistic recursively computational (finite) mind. Nature U, by contrast, is the unfathomable abyss of being, infinite labyrinth of darkness, impenetrable and hostile to man. The U-man, biological organism, is a stranger in L-man, the mind-controlled rational person, as expounded by Saint Paul. Noumena can now be seen to reside in L, and are not fully supported by phenomena. Kant’s noumenal cause is the mental L-image of only partly phenomenal causation. Mathematics occurs naturally in pre-linguistic phenomena, including natural laws, which give rise to pure mathematical structures in the world of L. Mathematical foundation within philosophy is reversed to where natural mathematics in the Gray Area of pre-linguistic phenomena can be seen to be a prerequisite for intellectual discourse. Lesser, nonverbal versions of L based on images are shared with animals. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,709 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesAndy Clark (2006). Material Symbols. Philosophical Psychology 19 (3):291-307.
Patrick Saint-Dizier (2012). Processing Natural Language Arguments with the Platform. Argument and Computation 3 (1):49 - 82.
Rom Harré & Roy Harris (eds.) (1993). Linguistics and Philosophy: The Controversial Interface. Pergamon Press.
Edward G. Belaga (2008). In the Beginning Was the Verb: The Emergence and Evolution of Language Problem in the Light of the Big Bang Epistemological Paradigm. Cognitive Philology 1 (1).
John Kadvany (2010). Indistinguishable From Magic: Computation is Cognitive Technology. Minds and Machines 20 (1):119-143.
Brigitte Falkenburg (2011). What Are the Phenomena of Physics? Synthese 182 (1):149-163.
John Kadvany (2010). Indistinguishable From Magic: Computation is Cognitive Technology. Minds and Machines 20 (1):119-143.
David M. Rosenthal (2000). Addendum to Introduction. In Materialism and the Mind-Body Problem. Hackett.
Mario Livio (2009). Is God a Mathematician? Simon & Schuster.
Peter Kroes (1994). Science, Technology and Experiments; The Natural Versus the Artificial. PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1994:431 - 440.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads4 ( #178,844 of 549,754 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,425 of 549,754 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
