🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct1.044951.18999@nuscc.nus.sg> matmcinn@nuscc.nus.sg (Mcinnes B T (Dr)) writes:
>I am a serious person with a vast store of good will. But you know that
>baloney is not a clock because you know that it doesn't measure time.
>That's because you know that time exists independently of devices used
>to measure it. It's about time [so to speak] to drive a stake [or is
>that steak?] through the heart of operationalism. .

1.  Which alternative did you have in mind?  Both in mathematics and
physics, Platonism postulates a reality independent of our
interpretation of that reality (the falling tree must make a sound).
Rationalism was Chomsky's alternative to Skinner's behaviorism,
advocating the explanation of observed phenomena in terms of postulated
unobserved phenomena.

I'm no great fan of Platonism, as my previous posts have indicated.  I
do however enormously like rationalism, which seems to me not only a
marvellously sensible way to do science but how most of us actually do
it in practice, whether or not consciously.  From that perspective
Platonism can be seen as merely a mental crutch allowing us to refer
all postulates to an imagined "reality," against which we imagine
ourselves to be testing those postulates.  This crutch seems very
effective, but the nature of that effectiveness is purely
psychological, reassuring us in much the same way that we are reassured
by looking out a window and seeing ground and buildings in their usual
places.

Instead of debating the unanswerable question of whether time has any
existence, would it not be better to focus on explanations of observed
temporal phenomena?

Such a line of investigation leads away from the rigid world of "one
time to bind them all" to a variety of notions of time.  This is done
for example in the paper "Temporal Structures", Mathematical Structures
in Computer Science 1:2, 179-214, July 1991, by Casley, Crew, Meseguer
and myself, where a variety of notions of time are defined, only some
of which assume that time is a continuum.  A similar theme is pursued
in Winfree's book "When Time Breaks Down", Princeton U. Press, 1987.

2.  Again let me ask: what does any of this discussion have to do with
time per se?  It seems to me that the points that have been made so far
on this topic could be applied to the observation and independent
existence of *any* observable.

-- 
=================================================== In short, I am floundering
Vaughan Pratt   pratt@cs.Stanford.EDU  415-494-2545 around and don't take what
=================================================== I say seriously.