From: posting-system@google.com Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 11:45 PM To: brian@holtz.org Subject: Re: Are irrational numbers supernatural? Follow Up Flag: Follow up Flag Status: Flagged From: brian@holtz.org (Brian Holtz) Newsgroups: alt.atheism.moderated Subject: Re: Are irrational numbers supernatural? References: <3c19287d.0@mercury.planet.net.au> <200112210845.AAA28313@lsil.com> <3c2fdf06.0@mercury.planet.net.au> <7dc30e65.0201021900.7d26a6e5@posting.google.com> <62b769e4.0201191516.511fbb64@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 12.236.1.8 Message-ID: <29c16047.0201232344.36992e5c@posting.google.com> "Paul Holbach" wrote > 1)There are no names making the statement "X is unknowable" a logical > one, since in order for it to be logical, there would have to be at > least one thing known: that it exists! You seem to be confusing two different senses of 'knowable': 1) recognizable/definable, and 2) known to be existent. > We simply cannot know what we cannot know, There are many things we know that we cannot know. I know that I cannot know that P is true, where P is "Brian Holtz does not know this statement is true". I know that I cannot have certain knowledge of arbitrary synthetic propositions. I know that I cannot know the precise momentum and position of any object. I know that I cannot know about any event whose light cone I am not in. I know that I cannot know both a proposition and its negation. > so we cannot > even SAY what we cannot know, as Wittgenstein would put it! Wittgenstein is by far the most over-rated philosopher, even more than Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Derrida, and Habermas -- not to mention past champions Marx and Freud. (Interestingly, Wittgenstein was not as wrong as these other guys -- he's just more mistakenly believed to be right.) In my experience, attribution to Wittgenstein correlates highly with nonsensicality and irrelevance. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net