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EPISTEMS

                                             September 1-8, 2020

                                            See Russell's "Basic Writings":
                                            http://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/The-Basic-Writings-of-Bertrand-Russell.pdf
   Russell concedes in a piece titled
   "Epistemological Premises" (1940)
   that minimizing the number of         Russell's idea is that with
   premises is a purely "aesthetic"      "epistemological premises"
   issue, and a concern that "the        it's useful to have multiple
   logician" has that "the               ones with different
   epistemologist" does not, which is    "weights" assigned to them,
   to say if what you care about is      so that you can check them
   actually knowing something, this      against each other.
   is all a moot point, at best.
                                           As in the case of "the logician"
                                           (i.e. the attempts at establishing
   Perhaps it shouldn't be so              firm foundations of mathematics), I
   surprising that Bertrand                 wonder exactly what the *purpose* is
   Russell places emphasis on              supposed to be of establishing these
   the role of aesthetics in               "epistemological premises".  I mean:
   math and logic-- elsewhere              do they help you actually know
   he's argued that math                   something?  Really, we know some
   should be studied for it's              things already, right, and we use
   "cold and austere" beauty.              what we know to infer "premises".

           MATHISM                         If you do it right, then the premises
                                           could act as a more compact
                                           representation of what we know,
   So "Principia Mathematica"              perhaps they could be used as part of
   might best be thought of as an          a technique for learning new things.
   unusual piece of artwork...

           One of the criticisms of "Principia
           Mathematica" is that it takes a 100
           or so pages of dense reasoning
           before they're willing to concede
           that 2+2=4.

           I keep wondering why anyone would
           think that's at all a reasonable
           approach... wouldn't you personally
           include basic arithmetic in your list
           of "self-evident truths"?

           Minimizing the list of intitial premises
           in the name of elegance seems much less        Larry Wall-- in the
           so when you look at the conniptions needed     context of designing
           to go through to establish the obvious.        programming
                                                          languages-- used to
                                                          refer to "the
                                                          waterbed theory of
                                                          complexity": if you
                                                          push down on it
                                                          *here* it tends to
                                                          pop up over *there*.


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