• About me (Gary L. Herstein, Ph.D.) / Contact form
  • Furious Vexation (general questions here)
  • Statement of Intent
  • With regard to Comments and Spam

THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

~ Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)

THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION

Category Archives: measurement

Strains, Planes, and Flat Loci

22 Saturday May 2021

Posted by Gary Herstein in Emergence, Logic, measurement, Mereology, Metaphysics, Process Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Logic, Process Philosophy

A running joke that Dr. Auxier and I incorporated into our booki was the phrase, “skip to page 337.” The pagination reference is to the Free Press edition of the corrected version of Whitehead’s monumental work of metaphysics, Process and Reality (“PR” hereafter.) Page 337 of PR is the start of the fifth part of the work, his rather poetic discussion on “God,” beyond the more concrete arguments of the preceding 337 pages. By “concrete” it should be understood that Whitehead’s “God” is not some religion inspiring big daddy in the sky that you go to church to beg candy from. Uneducated rumors to the contrary not withstanding, Whitehead never invented words. But at many points in his tome on “speculative philosophy” (his preferred term for what others call “metaphysics”) he needed to identify an “omega point” which served as the entirely impersonal foundation for the rational structure of the world as well as the “font of creativity.” He called this “God.” Were he inclined to use non-English words, a better choice might have been the Greek “arché” (αρχη). But Whitehead was Whitehead, and that was never going to happen, and so it did not.

Setting aside for the moment the question of “God,” there are some important issues in the material that the people skipping over to pg. 337 are, in fact, skipping over, in their stampeding rush to gin up a “Whiteheadian” theology. There are two things I want to talk about that are left all but untouched in the secondary literature on Whitehead, one of which is interesting and the other is downright revolutionary. These things appear in the pages that many scholars ignore when the skip to pg. 337. They are what Whitehead called “strains” and “flat loci.” I’ll address these in order. But first I’ll devote a paragraph to the work on natural philosophy that Whitehead developed in the years preceding PR.

Pages: 1 2

A = B

10 Monday Jun 2019

Posted by Gary Herstein in Logic, Mathematics, measurement, Philosophy of Logic

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

measurement, Modal Logic, Philosophy of Logic

Anyone who is reading this post – indeed, anyone who can read at all – has some minimal exposure to mathematical ideas, even if that exposure goes no further than elementary arithmetic and not, as I am only half-jokingly known to say, actual mathematics. (Well, since I’ve mentioned it: the thing I’m known to say is, “that’s not mathematics, that’s arithmetic.” This is always in response to someone who has protested something along the lines, “I’m no good at mathematics; I can’t even balance my checkbook.” The humorous, yet legitimately educative nature of MY statement always strikes me as obvious, yet I am constantly amazed by the numbers of people who get lost in the elementary rhetoric of my statement.)A equals B

In any event, even such minimal exposure is typically enough to satisfy most people, even most mathematicians (I suspect), that they have a pretty good handle on what that equals sign (“=”) means as it is expressed in, say, the title of this little essay. Clearly I wouldn’t be writing about it if such an impression was even remotely true. For one thing, how do we read “A = B”? Does it say, “A equals B”, or does it say “A is B”, and is there a difference between those two? Spoiler: yes. Yes to both questions, depending on how crudely one is using one’s language, which makes the fact that “equals” does not equal “is” an especially problematic conflation of terms. “Is” tends to mean “identity” in such a context, which is tricky enough in its own right (I wrote an MA thesis on the subject). The reading of “=” as “equals” helps to emphasize a somewhat more functional approach to matters, though it is still more rigid and “substantive” than such formal notions as “equivalence” and “isomorphism.” topics I’ll likely blog about in the future because I can already hear the math-phobes screaming in horror. For now, I want to focus on the logical issues of “equals,” as a formal relation. Thus, the word “equality” may also find a use here, but that use should not be mistaken for the political, economic, cultural, &/or social senses of the term. (On the other hand, I do not preclude in advance that what I say here will have no bearing on those uses, either.) Obviously, the starting point for the primary discussion is with the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Continue reading →

Measure is The Measure of All Things

29 Saturday Dec 2018

Posted by Gary Herstein in General Philosophy, Logic, measurement

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Philosophy, Technology

The online journal Eidos, A Journal for the Philosophy of Culture has just published a focus issue (#4 (6)/2018) on the topic of “Philosophy and Technology,” in which yours truly has an item. The title of my contribution is the same as this blog post, and it, along with all the other articles, is free for the download. It is a “discussion paper”, which means it is permitted a bit more leeway when it comes to scholarly standards of argument and citation. At some 6,000 words it is a good 4+ times larger than my longest blog posts, but it is free and possibly even interesting; at the very least it is at the same general level of readability of my regular blog posts, so folk who are interested can download it HERE.Robot

The entire journal may be accessed from the Eidos link above, and is well worth checking out, both for this current issue (table of contents reproduced below) and for the back issues that can be accessed through the link to the archives. As mentioned, this issue is about philosophy and technology approached, as one might guess from the journal’s title, from the general position and environment of questions of culture. Some folks might be surprised at such a choice of philosophical topics, as technology might not seem on the surface to have much to do with “the true, the beautiful, and the good,” the supposedly “core” topics of philosophy. But a couple of sentences from Marcin Rychter’s opening editorial struck me as quite appropriate here:

A simple conclusion seems inevitable: we can neither understand ourselves nor our times without deeply thinking about technology. A stronger claim seems plausible: technology should be the main topic of contemporary philosophy of culture.

Continue reading →

We Have Our Standards

17 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by Gary Herstein in Malala, measurement, Nobel, Standardized Testing, Stanford

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Education, Malala Yousafzai, measurement, Nobel, Standardized Testing, Stanford

So, Malala Yousafzai – Nobel laureate, civil rights leader, world-renowned advocate for uplifting women and girls through education – wants to study at Stanford University.Malala-Quote-10.10-Twitter

However, there’s a hitch.

You see, Stanford has “standards.” Continue reading →

Follow THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION on WordPress.com

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Blogs I Follow

  • The Shanarchist Cookbook
  • Cote du Golfe School of Fencing
  • Professor Watchlist redux
  • Free Range Philosophers
  • thenonsequitur.com
  • Blog Candy by Author Stacey Keith

Goodreads

Copyright Announcement

© Dr. Gary L. Herstein and garyherstein.com, 2014 -- 2021. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Dr. Gary L. Herstein and garyherstein.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content. (In other words, share but acknowledge.)
“But in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is, that it adds to interest.” – Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

Archives

Spam Blocked

69,402 spam blocked by Akismet

Blog at WordPress.com.

The Shanarchist Cookbook

Cooking up food for thought & Shanarchy. I am a Philosopher, writer, meditation & mindfulness teacher, & artist.

Cote du Golfe School of Fencing

Fencing / HEMA Classes & Lessons Naples, Bonita, Estero, Florida

Professor Watchlist redux

Free Range Philosophers

Loving Wisdom Beyond the Academy

thenonsequitur.com

Blog Candy by Author Stacey Keith

Science, logic, and ethics, from a Whiteheadian Pragmatist perspective (go figure)

  • Follow Following
    • THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION
    • Join 118 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • THE QUANTUM of EXPLANATION
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...