Re: BHA: Re: starting up DPF readings again.

[Colin Wight <Colin.Wight@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Nah, nah, nah Louis,

I'm having serious trouble getting my head round this, what has changed is
your thinking, not the propeties of pi. Pi doesn't have a property that it
did not have an hour ago, only your thinking about it does. If you want to
argue that pi changes with your thinking then it would seem to me to be a
paradigmatic case of the epistemic fallacy (notwithstanding any arguments
we might have about the reality of mathematical entities).

As you yourself say:

> It is of course the same number as before,

Exactly _IT_ hasn't changed.

but it
>enters into changing relations with other things.

Well, perhaps yes, but not always. If my 6 year old hears me discussing the
value of pi (a most unlikely event) with my partner's 12 year old and
declares he would like a steak and kidney one, his thoughts stand in no
relation to pi. Also, even in cases where there is some relationship it is
its relationship to other things which has changed (perhaps) not it.
Unless, of course it is internally related to these changing things. We
need a broader and more differentiated ontology than mere things, which is
what I think underpins Tobin's point about atomism.

  It is a fallacy to think that abstract
>objects do not enter into empirical relations.

Agreed. They are real and have causal powers, which answers Howard's
question about them - a causal criterion of the real; as opposed to as mere
empirical one.

Of course the resulting
>empirical properties of pi are not mathematical properties, which are
>essential to it, unlike my thinking about it.

Sorry, does my thinking about gravity change it?  Marx and preface to the
German Ideology springs to mind here. I can think thouhgts of pholgiston,
but these don't change it, not least because it is absent.

Thanks,






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