[Corpora-List] PS:minimal changes in a paragraph (based on a corpus it appeared) ... (2nd attempt (after first one was deleted))

[Patrick Juola]

On Tue, Aug 9, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Angus Grieve-Smith <grvsmth at panix.com>wrote:

>   Russell continues:'IT IS A LANGUAGE THAT HAS ONLY SYNTAX AND NO
> VOCABULARY WHATSOEVER.(My emphasis). Barring the omission of a vocabulary I
> maintain that it is quite a nice language. It aims at being the sort of
> language that, if you add a vocabulary, would be a logically perfect
> language.' He adds that actual languages are not logically perfect in this
> sense...
>
>
>     Then it's not a language, it's a model of a language.  I'm sure it's a
> very nice model, and useful for all sorts of purposes.  But Gödel showed
> that in general models can never completely capture reality,
>

No, he didn't.

 |  One of the biggest mistakes a scientist can make is to reify their own
model.  It is a dangerous form of hubris that can lead science off course
for generations.

And an even bigger mistake that scientists can make is to misunderstand what
they read and then misapply it in a completely inappropriate way in a
totally wrong discipline.

Godel showed that a formal system capable of doing arithmetic perfectly
cannot be both complete and consistent.  Since human beings are not formal
systems, this is of limited application.   In particular, we know for
independent reasons that a) humans can't do arithmetic perfectly, b) humans
aren't consistent, and c) humans aren't "complete" (as they have limitations
like finite attention spans and finite lifetimes).

So, Godel's theorem only shows that if human beings were something we know
they're not, they would have properties that we have already known them to
have.
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