From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 9:59 AM To: alt.atheism.moderated Subject: Re: Infinity (was: You' have to be God....ATTN: PH) Jim Humphries wrote: > > No, I told you precisely why I'm entitled to talk about > > six-ness as distinct from individual mental acts. You did > > not respond to or even dare quote my reason, so I'll repeat it: > > it is obvious that there is something > > that "an idea of 6 today and an idea of 6 yesterday" > > have in common. > > > ROTFL: the reason which I "dare not quote" is simply > an appeal to what is "obvious"! The bad news is that > it is anything but obvious: LOL. You (again) dare not quote my demonstration of obviousness. It suffices to repeat the demonstration below -- for a third time! > specifically you have not > explained why there should be something in common, I *precisely* "explained why there should be something in common". I said: It's precisely that which led you to say '6' both times rather than saying '7' or '525923'. > and what that 'something' is. Since I've already told you it's a "concept" and defined it as "abstraction", I'll pretend you're not just being contentiously dilatory here and instead have asked what concepts and abstractions are. The short answer is that they are the products of the not-fully-understood facility by which a mind induces general properties from instances, and are themselves the not-fully-understood facility by which a mind recognizes those general properties in other similar instances. There is a good discussion of "concept" in the Blackwell Companion to the Philosophy of Mind. For our purposes, note that the fact that we don't fully understand how the human mind forms and uses concepts does not at all imply platonism (i.e. that concepts have existence independent of minds and instances). > Could you now clarify > this, so that we can move the discussion forward. You make me repeat something three times, and then feign concern over "mov[ing] the discussion forward". LOL. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net