Whistling Docs?

[HDSarah]

I think that calling a PhD "doctor" is no more appropriate than calling a BS "bachelor" or an MA "master". When I was at the University of Chicago, the highest respect was shown to the instructor by calling him "mister" rather than "doctor" or "professor". That was a nice custom, I think.

Oo -- can I make people call me "Master"?

My bachelor's degree (in philosophy) was from an elite liberal arts college, and everyone called the profs "Mr." or "Ms." At least, I THINK I have a B.A. from there . . . the diploma is all in Latin except for my name, so if it just said "Ha ha this is a joke on Sarah" I'd never know. I'm more certain that I have two M.S. degrees, one in mathematics and one in civil engineering, because those diplomas are in English.

It's fun to see there are more philosophers and mathematicians here. (I already knew about Jim. ) Technically, I am now a research environmental engineer, but I still think of myself as a logician. Scientific research is definitely applied logic.

But if math can be
reduced to logic, as was attempted in the
last century, then math is indeed part
of philosophy, so philosophers can get
a raise and bigger offices.

First of all, I wouldn't say "reduced" -- maybe "rooted". I also prefer to think of 'logics', plural, because classical (Aristotelian) logic is not the only logic. (Hmmm . . . maybe I thought of a signature line: "The "Law" of Excluded Middle is only a convention.")

But yes, math is definitely part of philosophy, and has stayed much closer to philosophy than have philosophy's other children, because math is the one "science" that isn't based on observations of physical phenomena. (i.e., it's all a figment of our imaginations. )

I have bad news about the raise and bigger office, though: salary disparities between academics in different fields have some relationship to supply and demand. Our Department of Mathematical Sciences includes three areas: math, statistics, and computer science. The computer scientists get the most money because they can go out and get higher-paying jobs in the computer industry, so you simply can't get a C.S. prof for $35K a year. The statisticians can go work for insurance companies or for Fish and Game, the census bureau, etc., so you still have to pay more to get them. However, the pure mathematicians, like philosophers (and English lit scholars, historians, etc) don't have many employment options in their fields outside of the ivory tower, so the colleges don't have to pay them much to get them and keep them.

Sarah

[Bloomfield]

...

P. S. I do take Bloomfield's point that applied
philosophy is still philosophy. Thinking very
clearly about policy issues is philosophy,
especially when they involve life and death,
difficult ideas, or game theoretical issues.
Maybe philosophy is simply what good
philosophers do.

Actually, I think applied philosophy is jurisprudence.

[Dana]

I think that calling a PhD "doctor" is no more appropriate than calling a BS "bachelor" or an MA "master". When I was at the University of Chicago, the highest respect was shown to the instructor by calling him "mister" rather than "doctor" or "professor". That was a nice custom, I think.

Lets see, my first degree was a Bachelor's of Music. That means you can all call me BM. (Interesting title for an RN).

[jim stone]

Well, then I guess it's useless to reduce math to logic--
if philosophers can't get bigger offices, what's the point?
I took a long walk through Claremont CA with my wife
and a leading metaphysician. The trek ended when
my wife started boxing with the metaphysician.
Gee what a gorgeous place.
If I had an office there I certainly wouldn't want to
reduce math to logic.

Dan Dennett is a terrific philosopher (and psychologist)
but far away from solving the problem of consciousness
(namely, how can a wholly material system have
conscious states and think about things?). I think
we're getting stumped, in fact. How I wish I could
drop in on the discussion in a century!


Philosophy as jurisprudence--leading philosophers filed
a 'friends of the court' brief with the Supreme Court
concerning the arguments for physician-assisted
suicide. However the Court ignored them--fortunately,
IMHO. We've been involved in issues like famine
relief, the death penalty, the rights of animals,
gay and lesbian marriage, nuclear detterence
strategy and so on. Philosophers who came
of age during Vietnam decided that moral philosophers
should stop analyzing ethical language (boring
and fruitless) and start arguing for normative
positions--thank heaven!

[Zubivka]

Weekender, I think you're an 'autodidact.' Though
there ought to be more pretty word for what
you describe, which sounds lovely.

Or just a curious mind.
It's like calling a tummy a tummy, not a stomach--no real need for greek or latin, is there?

Btw: Weekender is right: the term "philosophe" was commonly used as an irony for winos, the Paris "clochards"; avoid as un-PC now it's seldom a choice of life.

[Bloomfield]

...

Philosophy as jurisprudence--leading philosophers filed
a 'friends of the court' brief with the Supreme Court
concerning the arguments for physician-assisted
suicide. ...

That's cute but not my point. What happens if you force a philosopher to decide? Even in "practical philosphy" which is directed toward human action (as distinguished from "theoretical philosophy" which is tries to understand everything but human action), the discussion hasn't really gotten past the conditions for the possibility of our understanding of human action. Even if pressed, a philosopher will rarely comit himself beyond "that's a problem (it not only appears to be one)." I am not saying that this is bad or avoidable. But what happens if you force someone into a position of making decisions, especially if you do more often then once. Very interesting effects. All the comfortable philosophical deadends, like solipsicsm, are cut off. Does everything become epistomology? (Hopefully not, but you never know...)

[jim stone]

I don't understand, I'm afraid. Analytic philosophy is
very different from the contiinental stuff--we make lots
of decisions. Of course I don't suppose we're
forced to--though refereeing articles, reviewing
books, and so on, you have to decide.

I do think continental philosophy
is better for romancing members of the opposite
sex. You can say: 'I'm an existentialist, baby.
Come up to my room and I'll show you all about
existentialism.' If you're a logician it's
no go: 'There exists an x, baby, such that
x is you and a y, such that why is me,
and a z such that z is my room, and
a relation R that binds x, y, and z...'
This explains why analytic philosophers
are a dying breed; they never get to
procreate.

I thought I might close this thread with
a story. Once in a faculty guest house
in India I was talking with several Marxist
academics, Indians who were pro-Soviet.
They were explaining how Americans are
spoilled individuals who like to have others
wait on them--no respect for manual labor.
We were outside in the garden--there was
a fellow cutting the lawn, a waiter bringing
us drinks, and a man pushing a cart full
of refuse down the walk.

I said: 'You know, I've done all these jobs.
I've waited on tables, I've mowed lawns,
and I've pushed carts through the streets
of New York.'

They looked at me with
horror. That a professor, a man with a
doctorate, would do such things, get his
hands dirty, filled them with disgust!
They were the ones who had no
respect for manual labor!
We are so egalitarian, compared to
the rest of the world. Just try to get an
Austrian academic to say he doesn't like
to be called 'doctor.' Best to all

[claudine]

Claudine, I just want to say that philosophers also save lives, or try to, anyhow.

Jim, take it easy. I just tried to tease you using a cheap joke, an old cliché. But I don't want to enter the Brightest Brain Contest.

[Wombat]

Weekender, I think you're an 'autodidact.' Though
there ought to be more pretty word for what
you describe, which sounds lovely.

Or just a curious mind.
It's like calling a tummy a tummy, not a stomach--no real need for greek or latin, is there?

Btw: Weekender is right: the term "philosophe" was commonly used as an irony for winos, the Paris "clochards"; avoid as un-PC now it's seldom a choice of life.

Call him curious if you like Zub, but I'll always think of the Weekenders as a loquaciously lurking polymath. Sorta like Walden only ...er ... not.

[Wombat]

Claudine, I just want to say that philosophers also save lives, or try to, anyhow.

Jim, take it easy. I just tried to tease you using a cheap joke, an old cliché. But I don't want to enter the Brightest Brain Contest.

Now with that eyepatch Claudine, how could Jim possibly recognise a wink? Oh, wait a minute, it was a razz wasn't it? An eypatch wouldn't disguise that, would it? Naughty Jim.

[Ridseard]

I think that according to Kurt Gödel's theorem on the incompletability of arithmetic, mathematics cannot be reduced to a system of logic which depends only on a finite set of axioms/postulates. His proof is impossible to refute, as far as I can tell. It is entirely constructive and does not depend on the "law of the excluded middle".

Toss out Gödel's proof, and you might as well toss out logic as a mode of thinking.

[Wombat]

I think that according to Kurt Gödel's theorem on the incompletability of arithmetic, mathematics cannot be reduced to a system of logic which depends only on a finite set of axioms/postulates. His proof is impossible to refute, as far as I can tell. It is entirely constructive and does not depend on the "law of the excluded middle".

Toss out Gödel's proof, and you might as well toss out logic as a mode of thinking.

Godel's proof (please excuse the acute lack of accents in my font) showed more than that. It demonstrated the impossibility of presenting elemenatry arithmetic as a consistent and complete axiomatic system. Any complete system of arithmetic would by inconsistent; any consistent system must be incomplete in that some truth of arithmetic gets left out. This is true even if, as Godel himself did, we supplement logical principles with irreducibly arithmetical principles. The proof works essentially by encoding the ancient Liar Paradox in the language of arithmetic. What it spelt the death of was not Frege's logicist program of reducing mathematics to logic but of Hilbert's program of presenting mathematics in the form of complete axiomatic systems. Without checking, I'm not sure in just which non-standard logics the proof would survive in.

Frege's logicist program was dead in the water probably late in the 19th century when he realised that if mathematics were to be encoded in set theory—this was the way the reductionist dream was to be realised—all the set theoretic first principles had to be logical principles. But it proved impossible to do the encoding without appeal to the axiom of infinity which says that infinite totalities exist. But how could logic alone guarantee this? This, as Frege recognised, was an irreducibly mathematical principle.

I wish I could think of something funny to say but right now I'm out of jokes—sorry! Well, perhaps you think I've just told one.

[EricWingler]

Wow, this is weird. I just opened up this thread and thought that somehow it had got crossed with the sci.math newsgroup. Whistlers are certainly a diverse group.

[sharrison]

Ridseard wrote:
I think that according to Kurt Gödel's theorem on the incompletability of arithmetic, mathematics cannot be reduced to a system of logic which depends only on a finite set of axioms/postulates.

Ridseard, Wombat, Bloomfield, Stone, et. al.

help me out here.

I thought the point of Gödel's theorem was that mathematics could be reduced, similar to a logical system, with a finite set of axioms, but that those axioms themselves could never be justified from within the system. In other words, whatever the foundational axioms were for that mathematical system, those axioms could not be proven, but only assumed to be true. Hence, no rational system could exist without some "irrational" assumptions.

I thought it was this understanding that drove Wittgenstein to abadon his focus from logic/mathmatics to the discussion of "language games"

Am I way off base here?

[Wombat]

Ridseard wrote:
I think that according to Kurt Gödel's theorem on the incompletability of arithmetic, mathematics cannot be reduced to a system of logic which depends only on a finite set of axioms/postulates.

Ridseard, Wombat, Bloomfield, Stone, et. al.

help me out here.

I thought the point of Gödel's theorem was that mathematics could be reduced, similar to a logical system, with a finite set of axioms, but that those axioms themselves could never be justified from within the system. In other words, whatever the foundational axioms were for that mathematical system, those axioms could not be proven, but only assumed to be true. Hence, no rational system could exist without some "irrational" assumptions.

I thought it was this understanding that drove Wittgenstein to abadon his focus from logic/mathmatics to the discussion of "language games"

Am I way off base here?

Not way off base; just a little I think. What you say sounds like a fairly common philosophers' gloss on the significance of the theorem. The precise content of the theorem is what I said it was: axiomatic presentations of elementary arithmetic are essentially incomplete if consistent, inconsistent if complete. This has some fairly modest implications for the abstract theory of computability—computability has limitations. But we shouldn't get overexcited by what the limitations are. The truths of a arithmetic that a consistent axiomatic theory would have to leave out are not very arithmetically interesting truths.

Anti-scientific philosphers and mystically minded lay-people have tried to extract just about every possible conclusion from this theorem. It's been a proof of free will according to some, a proof that the human mind is not a machine to others, it's even a cure for warts if you believe some. I buy none of that. It's a brilliant realization within modern mathematics of an essentially fairly simple ancient puzzle about whether or not a Cretan can say (truly) that all Cretans are liars. That is all. But that's in itself quite a lot. Unfortuneately, you still have to look elsewhere for a cure for warts.