Would it matter at this point?
Agreed.
You seem to have been entertained by the thread, nonetheless. Perhaps in both senses of the word as provided by Google:
I know that it has provided me with some amusement as it has progressed(as in, specifically - move forward or onward in space or time.(and again, thanks Google))
I didn’t see the opposition in what we each wrote. I agree that it is the liberal who challenges the establishment (in this case the Pythagoreans). The Pythagoreans insisted on a reality that was not logically true. But if the establishment is insisting on a reality that is logically true - the liberal challenges it with irrationality or bad logic (such as what is going on today - e.g. “male=female=male - just because we say so”). So “liberal” might be wrong or right depending on what is being challenged or “conserved”.
No. I am saying -
Yes except as you point out -
What I said was that there is no expression using numbers alone (as in the counting or natural numbers) that can ever exactly describe (\sqrt 2). I was referring to the establishment language = “natural numbers only”.
I would have easily believed that if I had never been observing James. But James seems to have done exactly what you are saying is proven impossible. I have seen James’ proof(s) but I have not seen a rational proof that reality is irrational. I can no longer doubt that reality is perfectly rational - and apparently even understand why.
See above.
To define = to unambiguously explain using different words.
So which of these possible definitions for “irrational” should we expect GA to be referring to in the OP? -
We’ll need a context of course. In regard to, for example, words like “freedom” and “justice”. In regard to, for example, the abortion wars.
How, in your view, would Saint unambiguously differentiate “the explanation using different words” in regard to mathematics and philosophy given what is said to be irrational with respect to conflicting moral and political assessments.
And then there’s still the part about your understanding of James S. Saint’s understanding of determinism in regard to exchanges of this sort. The discussion you seem to be avoiding on peacegirl’s determinism thread.
Or will you simply accuse me of “hijacking the thread” here instead?
You just gave 3 contexts. And yes this is sidetracking this thread.
Seeing how he and I think so much alike - I would guess that he would say - "What? 
"
The only thing I have avoided is injecting undue challenge to peacegirl’s intent and bubble of belief. Why would I do that? She already has 5-6 people challenging her. I wouldn’t be “adding to the entertainment”. 
I suspect that it is the inner awareness of a person’s guilt that causes them to project an accusation upon others - protecting their bubble.
The two-valued logic is also not suitable for the treatment of propositions about future events, because it implies a false determinism and leaves no space for the freedom of man.
If A is a proposition about future events, then the statement “A is true” can be more accurately described by the statement “There are (that is: present) causes that force the occurrence of A in the future”, and the statement “A is false” can be more accurately described by the statement “There are causes that force the occurrence of non-A in the future”.
A sentence like “Bill will be home tomorrow” will not usually be true or false in this sense, because there are usually no compelling causes that determine Bill’s behavior. Thus, to deal with such cases, one must introduce a third truth value, which can be assigned the property “unknown” or the property “not yet” (cf. the arrows in my diagram), which a proposition A about future things takes on precisely when there are no compelling causes for A or not-A to occur.
A roughly similar argument is already found in Aristotle (the famous example of tomorrow’s sea battle).
Not that I would wish the following case, but: Maybe the “physics of psychology” must already be unnamed in “psychology of physics”.
Almost everything is about to turn around, so that it can also be said that irrationality wrests more and more fields from rationality, although it should be the other way round, if one looks at it from the age of enlightenment (rationalistic optimism).
Perhaps today one, who wants to carry out a physical experiment, must first go through a “psychotherapy” or/and must present a “certificate” at the “Institute for social therapy” (in the context of the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt school), before he is allowed to carry out such an experiment.
Physics is not only a rational matter. It never was. But it had times when the irrational parts were very small. Today, the irrational parts within physics are growing enormously. So we have again an example where both occur at the same time: rational and irrational. Physics consists of experiment, theory and people (mostly called “physicists”) who influence both the experiments and the theories (cf. Heisenberg’s indeterminacy resp. uncertainty principle). The epistemology or philosophy of science can be indifferent from its results (findings, knowledge) whether it is humans or machines (artificial intelligence) who deliver the findings, the knowledge.
Physics has the potential to be a rational matter if only it can solve one problem. Science would remain rational if people would stop messing/fiddling with definitions - I personally prefer: the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding|from Merriam-Webster or as Google more simply puts it: ARCHAIC - knowledge of any kind.| Knowledge being the stuff that we actually know. Which all things considered I have no problem with knowledge being: true, justified belief; certain understanding, as opposed to opinion - I go via the undefeated justified true belief route. What physics can prove can be considered knowledge and what it can not is still waiting to be proved as opposed to being knowledge.
I also treat the unknown in a particular way that makes it useful, however, we can not believe in that which we do not know and it would be unjustified to call that which we do not know truth.
It is not irrational to acknowledge(as in: think about and begin to deal with (an issue or problem)) and deal with the unknown(and/or the irrational) but it would be irrational(unreasonable) to assume that we can 1. integrate the unknown or 2. integrate that which can still be easily defeated.
Rationality should have some strength about it - knowledge should have some strength about it - both have proven to be valuable whereas the irrational and unknown innately fail to prove their worth.
Physicists can possibly be irrational (quite often it seems). Physics itself is never irrational - else it isn’t actual physics (the tools of predicting physical behavior). Physics either works or it doesn’t. If an effort only sometimes works - it is accepted that the physics was not real - or was misapplied - or perhaps simply unknown for that situation.
And “two-state logic” has limited application (“This statement is false”).
I still think that it is only irrational language use that is going on (here and elsewhere). There is nothing irrational about reality - only the language and choices people make.
It is about the people involved - not reality itself.
I added an edit to my last post.
Yes…and as I will/would often say/have said, it is about the alignment of internal states(or patterns(even processes)) among people in the group as opposed to the group being aligned to the lie.
Sorry - got a little carried away there - as we all do at times with those things we value.
I concur. I was tempted to give a binary solution before but I could not be arsed.
I think that if a person sees an event and believes that it - the event itself - is irrational - then that person should know that there is something irrational in his mind - his presumptions - his understanding - or maybe his eyes. That is the opposite of current irrational wokism. Wokism is a power-grab - “Don’t believe your lying eyes. Reality is what we tell you it is. We WILL dictate what reality is, Damnit!” - “Godwannabe”.
Too many isms it is creating schisms. I can not comment on all of this because apparently I have been living under a rock(figure of speech).
The “reality” part(bit toward the end) and “the event itself”(yup, bit more toward the beginning) part resonates(as in: (of an idea or action) meet with someone’s agreement.) with me.
I particularly like the segment: “Don’t believe your lying eyes”
And due to the apparent nature of me living under a rock(figure of speech - FFS) and what that entails, the world is a very peculiar(as in: strange or odd; unusual.) place compared to the last time I checked it.
As a good example - James’ qualms with the “Quantum Magi”.
QM advocates claimed that if something that could be potential true or false is present then it is both true and false at the same time (dictating reality). They claimed that if two people had data on a disc and took it home not knowing whether the data showed something to be positive or negative - once either of them look at the data - the data on both discs instantly changed to whatever the person saw - even though the discs were separated. That was then “QM proof” of instantaneous affect at a distance. Another example was of data that instantly reversed time to change a prior data set into revealing what a person saw - “QM proof of time travel”.
In all such cases the QM people are trying to dictate reality by whatever people see rather than accept that what they see is the result of immutable reality. That (I assume) is why he called them “Magi” - promoting magic. They are the Godwannabes within the physics realm.
It is a political/cultural/socialist subversive effort - a power-grab to gain the authority and freedom to command the world.
It is changing fast but I wouldn’t recommend watching it change - it is extremely ugly and seriously abusive. It gets hard to maintain MIJOT while watching it happen - especially in governments and ubiquitous entertainments. 
“Look away - look away” 
And just smile. 
Sounds like the reason I carry on a little about Russian dolls - they keep hiding their tracks - when you place the bigger doll over the smaller doll you no longer see the smaller doll…
…or something like that. Reminds me of super-determinism(who would have thought).
It is all so stupid that it makes me laugh. Comedy through irony. The value of rabbit holes…hmm…
We’ll need a context of course. In regard to, for example, words like “freedom” and “justice”. In regard to, for example, the abortion wars.
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I’ll take this to our thread – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=196433 – and respond tomorrow
That’s what I suspected. You reject the law of excluded middle and you do so because of Aristotle’s sea-battle paradox. Personally, I think Aristotle’s paradox is merely a bad argument against the law of excluded middle, not really a proof that the law of excluded middle is inapplicable in certain cases (e.g. when dealing with propositions about future events.)
His argument is basically:
If it was true a month ago that Bill will have a dinner today then a month ago it wasn’t possible for Bill to not have a dinner today.
The problematic part is the term “possible”. What does that term mean? Can you define it?
I say that something is possible if a situation that will cause that thing can be conceived. It is possible for a bomb to explode even if it never does so. It is possible for people to pronounce non-existing words such as “tnetennba” even if they never do so. In that sense, if an outcome is necessary it does not follow that a different outcome was impossible. When we say that Bill has the freedom to choose whether he’ll have a dinner or not, we’re saying something along the lines of “If he decides to do so, and if he does not change his mind, he will have a dinner (or not).” If I correctly predict that he’ll have a dinner in a few days, that does not necessarily mean that he has no freedom of choice. It can, for example, mean that he didn’t decide to not have a dinner or that he did but that he changed his mind at a later point in time. And even if it does mean that he had no freedom of choice in that particular case (say as a consequence of addiction), that wouldn’t mean there’s something wrong with the law of excluded middle.
But is that what Aristotle means? The last sentence suggests that he means something else (as well as that he might be equivocating.) There is a sense in which a statement such as “If something will not be the case, it is not possible for it to be the case” is true. If I think Bob will go to Chicago tomorrow and if I think that the probability of that event is 100% then I necessarily believe that the probability that he won’t go to Chicago is 0% i.e. that it is impossible. But that is not saying that Bob will go to Chicago tomorrow regardless of what happens today – merely that he will go to Chicago tomorrow. So in one sense, it is possible for Bob to not go to Chicago (in the sense that if certain events take place before he takes off, he will not go to Chicago) and in another sense it is impossible (in the sense that he simply won’t go to Chicago which implies that nothing that will revert his decision will take place.)
Note also that “unknown” is not a word that can be used to describe the relation between a description of reality and a reality itself. Rather, it is a word that can be used to describe how strongly someone believes something. Specifically, it means “I don’t know if a description is true or false”. And once you introduce such states in logic, logic is no longer purely about map-territory relation. Indeed, you can make systems of logic that are entirely about strength of belief e.g. an infinite-valued logic where negative values represent how strongly you believe a statement is false, where zero represents a neutral stance (i.e. that you’re not sure) and where positive values represent how strongly you believe a statement is true. Nothing wrong with such systems but they are no longer about reality as such. And their existence certainly does not mean there’s something wrong with the law of excluded middle.
And that addresses what the QM people do - they conflate possibility with reality - "because it is possible that it is true and possible that it is false then in reality it is both true and false. And they teach that as a fact in university.
But when it comes to the issue of excluded middle, I think there is a different kind of excluded middle involved in that paradox (similar arguments have been presented to jurors in court cases).
If we exclude the middle of his narrative -
What do we get? - “Suppose that a sea-battle will not be fought tomorrow — Therefore, it is not possible that the battle will be fought.”
His conclusion is his premise. “If it is true - then it is true”
There is a name for that kind of argument.
And when it comes to statements like - “Bill will be home tomorrow” - there are always presumptions of understanding - in this case it is presumed that the listener knows that it is just a statement of high confidence - not a declaration of absolute fact (assuming it wasn’t the Pope speaking). It is a short hand language issue - not a logic issue.
It’s just playing with the definition of the word “possible”.
This is easily cleared up when you consider that there is a dimension of unsubstantiated imagination.
Just to let you know that, as promised, rather than “hijack” this thread, I took our exchange here: ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 3&start=50
Thank you - it is easier to ignore over there.