From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org] Sent: Wednesday, May 22, 2002 7:26 AM To: alt.atheism.moderated Subject: Re: Science & atheism are cultures. "Paul Holbach" wrote: > One could substitute "formative stuff" for it. I don't know what "formative stuff" is, either. The empty world would contain no matter, if that helps you. > In order for there to be absolute nothingness, the > empty world would have to vanish as well. If you're going to stipulate that the empty world does not count as absolute nothingness, then your proof that absolute nothingness cannot exist does not imply that the empty world cannot exist. > > If you're denying that the logical possibility of a world is > > independent of particular minds, then prove it: identify a world > > and two distinct minds for which that world is and is not > > logically possible, respectively. > > Whenever I speak of "mind-independence" Iīm not referring to any > particular mind of an individual person but, so to speak, to the > collective mind of mankind If there is no possible individual or collective mind of man or any other species for which the logical possibility of a any given world varies, then the logical possibility of worlds is mind-independent. > > Are you claiming that speakers of some human > > languages could not e.g. recognize Russell's paradox? > > But if there is some natural language > that doesnīt know anything similar to our notion of "set", the native > speakers of that language would indeed be unable to grasp the content > of Russellīs paradox. That's not my question. My question was: is there some possible human language for whom Russell's paradox could never be a paradox? I.e. it's simply obvious that the notion of sets is independent of particular languages -- no matter how many times you make the facile point that any pronouncement about sets is always performed using a particular language. -- brian@holtz.org http://humanknowledge.net