Posted on 03/25/2002 7:53:24 PM PST by ThinkPlease
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:52:15 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
"I hate your opinions, but I would die to defend your right to express them." This famous quote by the 18th-century philosopher Voltaire applies to the debate currently raging in Ohio. The Board of Education is discussing whether to include alternate theories of evolution in the classroom. Some board members however, are opposed to Voltaire's defense of rational inquiry and intellectual tolerance. They are seeking to prohibit different theories other than Darwinism, from being taught to students. This threatens freedom of thought and academic excellence.
(Excerpt) Read more at asp.washtimes.com ...
Ferbotten?
Water, wind, etc.
How do you explain them?
But I seem to have stupidly failed to grasp your point. Why is this an important question? The important question, to me, is rather the question whether the conventional definition of "well ordered" makes sense. Which has very little to do with Platonism.
In no particular order: Yes, the "axiom of choice" must be either true or false. So, which is it? My position is simple (may be too simple). If the AoT is true, then the reals are well ordered. But the reals are evidently not well ordered, since the subset denoted by (0,1] has no least member.
The proof of that is a pretty strong one, namely that if you offer me a candidate least member, say r, then I can offer a better candidate, namely r/2. This is the exact same strategy as we use in the proof that there is no largest prime, which no mathematician has ever believed fallacious.
Hence, everything "proved" by the AoT is dubious, including your previous example (by Vidali wasn't it?) of a set that can be shown to have measure both zero and non-zero.
As another digression, do I believe (or suspect) that there are incomparable transfinite cardinals, ie t1, t2 such that it is not the case that t1>t2 or t1=t2 or t1<t2? Again, it's not something I've ever considered relevant to Platonism as such, but I would neither be surprised if two such cardinals existed nor devastated if they did not.
Another amusing problem is that each of these possitilities can be translated into a problem in elementary number theory. So the truth of trichotomy of transfinite sets, for example, is equivalent to some elementary number theory statement; which statement is probably something like: "there exist no solutions to the following equation: blah, blah, blah..."
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