Re: New mikveh wars in Israel

In article <1151515043.530862.148930@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Shlomo Argamon <argamon@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Scoop wrote:

As someone schooled in General Semantics, though, it really irks me to hear
people describe the Talmud as "illogical" -- as though binary Aristotelian
logic is the only kind there is (akin, IMO, to a diatonic-trained musician
denouncing Gamelan, Raga or Hejaz as "unstructured").

Precisely - and an EXCELLENT analogy! I'm reminded of how the Vienna
Circle venerated their positivistic interpretations of Wittgenstein,
while he denounced them as entirely missing the point. There is far
more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the positivist's
philosophy... Goedel demolished Hilbert's program; this scientistic
need to reduce all knowledge to that of the scientific kind (however
specifically defined) smacks of the Principia Mathematica, which was
shown (in the end) to be an utter waste of time.

Goedel showed that Hilbert's program was impossible; he did
not in any way decrease what could be demonstrated, only
what was thought to be possible to be demonstrated.

There still cannot be contradictions; there could be contradictory
systems, but this is merely stating that some things can neither
be proved or disproved.

The Talmud is quite
logical, but the logic is of a textual-analytic rather than mathematic
kind -- it's perfectly consistent and universally applicable, and what more
could you ask from logic?

Quite. One reason that it is often quite useful and indeed
indispensable to learn the history of a discipline (i.e., reading the
original masters), is that one can often discover how much of value was
discarded in reaching our "modern" understandings. The field of logic
is one such - the influence of 19th century formalism (not to mention
the longer-reaching influence of Aristotle) has been such that the very
notion of rhetoric (in its classical sense) has been largely lost, let
alone its relevance to the pursuit of logic (except in debate clubs,
which, fortunately, appear to be on the rise). Talmudic logic is a
logic of the "text", not of the "metaphysical mathematical formal model
of a compositional and reducible physical process".

Talmudic logic is the logic of persuasion or possibility.
It can be used to get a huge variety of contradictory results.
It is at best a totally nonscientific method of induction.

Someone stubbornly adhering to the Aristotelian Heresy would
definitely be at a disadvantage, though (to quote the Dagobaher Rebbe, "You must
unlearn what you have learned").

Goedel did not upset Aristotelian logic, as modified by Boole.
It is just more complicated than Aristotle or Boole imagined.
Any complete Boolean algebra can be used as a model for
mathematics (Rasiowa and Sikorski), and Cohen's forcing
arguments can be obtained by choosing the Boolean algebra
appropriately. This was not realized at the time, however.

Isn't the correct quote here "Unlearn what you have learned, you must"?
:-)

Unlearn what you have learned which isn't so.



--
This address is for information only. I do not claim that these views
are those of the Statistics Department or of Purdue University.
Herman Rubin, Department of Statistics, Purdue University
hrubin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Phone: (765)494-6054 FAX: (765)494-0558
.

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