“The definition of definition is at bottom just what the maxim of pragmatism expresses.”
— Charles Sanders Peirce
— Charles Sanders Peirce
“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.”
— William James
— William James
“Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty: And I repeat that government has but a choice of evils.”
— Jeremy Bentham
— Jeremy Bentham
“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
— H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
“How are we to adjudicate among rival ontologies? Certainly the answer is not provided by the semantical formula "To be is to be the value of a variable"; this formula serves rather, conversely, in testing the conformity of a given remark or doctrine to a prior ontological standard.”
— Willard van Orman Quine, On What There Is
— Willard van Orman Quine, On What There Is
“Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.”
— John Dewey
— John Dewey
Equilibrium = {
abstract source, destination as Quantity
abstract equation as Equation
if not equation.exists(source) or not equation.exists(destination) then fail
source:postassign = new Method {equation.solveFor(destination)}
destination:postassign = new Method {equation.solveFor(source)}
}
Relativity = {
abstract difference as Quantity
is Equilibrium {
reified equation = new Equation {destination, equals, source, add, difference}
}
}
Proportionality = {
abstract coefficient as Quantity
is Equilibrium {
reified equation = new Equation {destination, equals, source, multiply, coefficient}
}
}
Circle = {
abstract radius, circumference as Quantity
new Proportionality {source: radius, destination: circumference, coefficient: 2*pi}
}
Rectangle = {
abstract width, height as Quantity
}
Square = {
is Rectangle {}
new Equilibrium = {
reified source = width, destination = height
reified equation = new Equation {source, equals, destination}
}
}
a = new Square
a.width = 5“I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science, whatever the matter may be.”
— Lord Kelvin
— Lord Kelvin
“It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!”
— George Gamow, The Creation of the Universe (1952)
— George Gamow, The Creation of the Universe (1952)
“We're like children who always want to take apart watches to see how they work.”
— Ernest Rutherford
— Ernest Rutherford
“It is because the spirit is inestimable that the lifeless body is so little valued.”
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
significance is essential for individuation
significance is a subjective attribute of phenomena
∴ individuation is subjective
significance is a subjective attribute of phenomena
∴ individuation is subjective