Who's Afraid of Veridical Wool?

Who could not handle descriptions that were woolly and yet veridical? Russell (and before him, Aristotle). Russell thought that we should make up a non-woolly language and use a formal logic (a mathematical model of logical reasoning) to calculate truth-values (instead of truths). I have been taking an informal approach to the Liar paradox because after much thought, I can see that self-descriptions like ‘this is false’ are about as true as not (and because I can see the point of pursuing truths). I am therefore beginning (see the previously-posted post below) with the equally ancient paradoxes of vagueness. My approach is informal because I find the precision of mathematical logic to be inapposite when there is no sharp division between something being the case and it not being the case. The literature on these paradoxes has become increasingly formal, following Bertrand Russell’s interest in Georg Cantor’s mathematics (at the start of the twentieth century), but we do not need non-classical logic to resolve them; rather, we need to focus on the context of classical logic, natural language, in which the paradoxes are expressed. Below (because posted before) ‘Vagueness’, are ‘Liar Paradox’ and ‘Cantor and Russell’.

It was via Russell that I came to consider the Liar paradox, having developed an interest in Cantor because of qualms about the fitness of the real number line as a model of actual continua, which developed as I did my MSc in maths (at the end of the twentieth century). With this post, I have come to the end of my journey. I am left wondering why our mathematics became set-theoretical, and then category-theoretical; and similarly, why our natural philosophy became the physicalism of Einstein et al, and then string-theoretical. But in the absence of much interest in my research, I am becoming more interested in photography now (over on Google+).