Saturday, January 24, 2015

Pugnaciously vacuous definitions


At the beginning of his preface to the introductory exposition Philosophy of Logic (1970),  W.V.O. Quine quotes Tweedledee:

“Contrariwise, if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t.  That’s logic.”

That was a bit of nineteenth century donnish waggery (though it does give rather the flavor of modal logics and possible-world semantics  in our own day).

Quine then drolly goes on:

If pressed to supplement Tweedledee’s ostensive definition of logic  with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths.

We pause for Homeric laughter.
Anyone schooled in the lore of Russell’s paradox and impredicative definitions, will recognize that the professor is having his fun.

He then has some more:

Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true  if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true.  Pressed further still, I would say to read this book.

(Ah!  ‘Tis a plaint  we ourselves have often made:  Buy my books!)



[Note:  Contrast the  equally terse but quite unselfreferential definition of logic in
R. Goldblatt, Topoi , 2nd edn. 1984:  “the study of the canons of deductive reasoning”.  Word for word, that’s very good.]


The jest is not without a subtle content, assuming as it tacitly does that there are such things as logical truths (a subject we see in a different light after Quine’s own extended attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction).   And it is quite in line with Quine’s celebrated existential bon mot:

    “To be is to be the value of a variable.”

To non-initiates, that will be mystifying;  to semi-initiates, cheeky; to familiar navigators of Quinespace, an ultra-compact allusion to his perennial concern with ontology in relation to quantification.

Put more pugnaciously:

Existence is -- what existential quantification expresses.
 -- W.V.O. Quine, “Existence and Quantification” 
~

The celebrated Cambridge Philosopher of Bland, G. E. Moore, wrote in his Principia Ethica:

If I am asked, “What is good?”, my answer is:  Good is good;  and that is the end of the matter.

That is:  If you have to ask, I can’t tell you.  (Even so, that pseudo-definition is preferable to the nihilist/reductionist dismissal by the Eliminative Materialists.)



Indeed, I shall now venture a definition  quite in Moore’s spirit:

Truth is … what is true (and known to God as such), quite apart from human-knowability, let alone provability (whether by finitistic, intuitionistic, or classical means).
~
From a college textbook:

A measure space consists of a set X equipped with two fundamental objects:
(1) a σ-algebra M of “measurable” sets, which is a non-empty collection of subsets of X closed under complements and countable unions and intersections.
(2) A measure μ: M -> [0, ∞] with the following defining property …
-- Elias Stein & Rami Shakarchi, Real Analysis (2005), p. 263

The bolded terms are there defined; but the term measurable sets is not -- the clause that follows reminds us of the definition of a σ-algebra instead.  The authors acknowledge their sleight-of-hand (effectively remedied by material elsewhere in the book) by placing the offending word in quotation marks. -- Note that this typographic care exemplifies the semantic Akribie of math writers, which we have elsewhere praised.




Not all math authors are as onomastically aware as those.  As:

Old-fashioned text-books  tend to start off with mystifying definition of these terms:  Euclid’s own definition,  “A point is that which has no part”, is a good example.  After a perfunctory discussion of these, the author clears his throat, begins a new chapter, and gets going with some concrete examples:  the definitions are mercifully forgotten.
-- Stephen Toulmin, The Philosophy of Science (1953), p. 72

~

To define -- literally, ‘delimit’ -- is by way of penning-in the definiendum with antecedently familiar landmarks.   To say that none such exist, is to refuse definition;  as in this classic hymn:

There is nothin' like a dame,
Nothin' -- in -  the -  world,
There is nothin' you can name
That is anything like a dame!
-- “South Pacific”



By this point  we have passed definitely from the realm of Oxbridge drollery to that of Joe on the Boat.  And here, indeed, we discover a whole subculture of definitional legerdemain, noticed in the delightful Dictionary of American Slang, by Wentworth & Flexner (1967).   In the Supplement we find this entry:

blivit   (n.)
   Anything unnecessary, confused, or annoying.  Lit. defined as “10 pounds of shit in a 5-pound bag.”  Orig. W.W. II Army use.  The word is seldom heard except when the speaker uses it in order to define it;  hence the word is actually a joke.


As a former harmless-drudge chez Merriam-Webster, I salute that as a gem of the lexicographic art.


A classic development of the pugnaciously uncooperative definition -- Lexicography with an Attitude -- is The Devil’s Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce.  (Sample:  fork: an instrument for putting pieces of dead animals into the mouth.”)  Similarly impish was Hobbes’ definition of paradox:  “an opinion not yet generally received”.



A Pugnaciously Vacuous definition of the meaning of life  can be viewed here:
~

Quite other than such conscious humor, are cases like this:

Hamilton follows the Kantian notion of time closely in his “Essay on Algebra as the Science of Pure Time”.  Since the inner sense of time is more general than the outer sense of space, Hamilton concludes that algebra is a more general and fundamental branch of mathematics than geometry.
-- Thomas Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1980), p. 268

As the discoverer of quaternions, Hamilton has as much right as anyone to deliver himself of after-dinner remarks (a genre of public speaking to which he was particularly devoted) about the nature of algebra;  but this one is horse-hockey.
 

(Psychohistorical note:  Hamilton was for a time utterly immersed in Kant;  this characterization of algebra as the “Science of Pure Time” stems from psycho-philosophical exuberance, rather than algebraical expertise. 
A curious tentative parallel might be made with Hamilton’s countryman G.K. Chesteron, who likewise was given to flights of literary exuberance;  both were in marital situations requiring a great deal of self-sacrifice,  which they met with infinite patience;  and both were given to a kind of idealism  which some might diagnose as compensatory.
Okay, beyond our pay-grade.  Yet as Silvan Schweber affirms in his perceptive review [Isis, 1982] of this exemplary socioscientific biography:  “Hankins has eschewed giving psychoanalytical interpretations, [but] to anyone interested in the psychodynamics of creativity, William Rowan Hamilton presents a fascinating case study.”)

~

Another subcategory -- already bordered on by Hamilton’s epigram for the definition of algebra -- is formed by definitions which, while not vacuous, we might label Pugnaciously Perverse.   The poet Coleridge was (unfortunately) Hamilton’s philosophical mentor, even as regards what Science ought to be; and he defined that subject  thus:

“any chain of truths which are either absolutely certain, or necessarily true for the human mind, from the laws and constitution of the mind itself.  In neither case is our conviction derived, or capable of receiving any addition, from outward experience, or empirical data.”
-- Thomas Hankins, Sir William Rowan Hamilton (1980), p. 268

(That first sentence does oddly prefigure the sort of prose  churned out by the truckload by the epigones of Donald Davidson.  -- Note too the anticipation of Post-Modernism.)


~

Another non-cooperative move in the orismological game, is pooh-poohing the very definiendum -- denying that there is anything coherent to define.  One Christian writer (C.S. Lewis or Hilaire Belloc, I forget which) once said testily, that the notion of “the Renaissance” was a will-o’-the-wisp, used  by secular writers to mean “whatever I like that happened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”

~

Composing a truly vacuous definition  is harder than you’d think.
Thus, consider the Euclidean definition of a point (“that which has no part”) which our philosopher friend scoffed at;  and let us phrase it even more egregiously:

point:  a point-like figure

That actually has cognitive content.  It means:  To visualize what is meant when geometers refer to a punctum (as opposed to a linea, etc.), think of something like a pencil-point.  Do not think of something like a dance-floor, or the cosmos, or an elephant.

And:

set:  a set of elements

Here the definition is so far from vacuous that someone could reasonably object that it is actually false, since it excludes the null-set.   (In this ‘definition’, the stress, so to speak, is on “elements”; “set” could be replaced by “bunch” or “passle” or “bucketload”.)

For indeed:

There is no direct circularity  if we presuppose sets in our study of sets (or induction in our study of induction), since the first occurrence of the word is in the metalanguage, the second in the object language.
-- Michael Potter, Set Theory and its Philosophy (2004) , p. 9


In further defense of impredicativity:

Impredicative definitions are necessary for ordinary mathematics, as they are unproblematic if one adopts a realist attitude about the objects defined -- realist in just the sense that the objects exist in advance of the definitions, that they are picked out by the definitions, not created by them.  That imposes a substantial constraint on any acceptable philosophy of mathematics.
-- Shaughan Lavine, Understanding the Infinite (1994), p. 107

~

The grandfather of all tautological definitions is the one given by Yahweh in Exodus: 

~ ~ ~  I  Am   That  I  Am  ~ ~ ~

Yet at the same time, that is the best definition that could be given, since, in a common view of the Abrahamic religions, any limitative predication would be false.   (That view led in particular to the via negativa,  which insisted on the denial of all suggested predicates of the One.)

~

Another style of coyness with definition  is illustrated in the following, immediately after the authors have introduced Maxwell’s Equations  for E and H in free space:

At first we do not attempt to give physical meaning to these symbols.  We merely say:  let us assume that there exist physical quantities represented by symbols having the indicated properties, and see what these equations say about the quantities.  From the last two equations [to the effect that E and H -- whatever they might be -- have divergence zero], it is clear that E and H are solenoidal
-- Robert Lindsay & Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (1936), p. 303

After a few pages of discussion, the authors summarize:

In a very real sense, therefore, these equations may be said to constitute a definition of E and H.
-- Robert Lindsay & Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (1936), p. 306

Thus, back where we began.  The dangled definition in intuitive terms, is ultimately withheld:   No dessert until you finish your broccoli;  then -- Your broccoli was your dessert.

They subsequently reinforce the apophatic stance:

Physical meaning of E and H:  … The only real importance of the quantities is involved in the fact that they satisfy the field equations. … It seems most logical to go the whole way and treat E and H as defined by the field equations in all cases.  The commoner definitions can then be looked upon as mere picturizations. -- Robert Lindsay & Henry Margenau, Foundations of Physics (1936), p. 311

E & H:  They Are That They Are.


~

Lakatos offers his translation of an epigram from Poincaré:

    Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

Now, that is not vacuous (i.e., vacuously true, or anyhow only infinitessimally informative), since it is egregiously false;  but it is a witticism, not a blooper, since we all know that Poincaré was perhaps the leading mathematician of his time -- he has some cards up his sleeve, which he will slip out when it suits him.

For a series of essays on the art of definition, with especial reference to math,
try these:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/definition



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