Thursday, February 01, 2018
Is there a Problem with Prefaces?
Suppose that in the preface to some non-fiction book, the author apologizes for whatever false statements there may be in the book, observing that there are bound to be some, even though each statement in the book is believed to be true by the author. Is this a Preface Paradox? Philosophers often "solve" this problem by taking belief to be sufficiently high credence, so that we would not believe large conjunctions of our beliefs; but of course, our believing each of our beliefs means that we believe them all. Belief is simply not sufficiently high credence (as recently posted). In fact, there is no problem here to solve. And of course, not even a philosopher would ask: Why not say that sets are simply such that sets of beliefs are well-behaved? Could we not have all that we want and nothing that we do not want by putting precisely that much into the axioms of our favourite set theory? No: that is simply not what conjunctions of beliefs are. Nevertheless, that is essentially the mainstream response to Cantor's Paradox (which I shall be posting on in my next few posts). The Preface "Paradox" may not be very paradoxical, but it does show how absurd the mainstream foundations of mathematics are.
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