Word: fall
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...know a discipline has arrived when its detractors start depicting themselves as radicals assaulting the intellectual status quo. This fall John Horgan (The End of Science) will come out with a book that, according to its publisher's catalog, "boldly contradicts all standard views" of psychology, "including those of Steven Pinker and E.O. Wilson." Ah, vindication at last...
...about the launch and inquiries poured into Clark, Goddard answered each with a pinched, "Work is in progress; there is nothing to report." When he finished each new round of research, he'd file it under a deliberately misleading title--"Formulae for Silvering Mirrors," for example--lest it fall into the wrong hands...
...translation on the right, and the sentences are numbered, using a hierarchical system that tells you this is a formal proof. The book begins straightforwardly enough: "1. The world is everything that is the case." (In German, it makes a memorable rhyming couplet: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.) And it ends with an ending to end all endings: "7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent...
...their words mean--what their words must mean, they think--when they talk about what's going on in their own minds. As he says, "The decisive moment in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent." (Today's neuroscientists fall into these same traps with stunning regularity, now that they have begun trying to think seriously about consciousness. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein's work has not been appreciated by many scientists.) But didn't his own antidote to such theories constitute a theory of the mind? That is just one of many...
...catch a rare glimpse of two great minds addressing a central problem from opposite points of view: the problem of contradiction in a formal system. For Turing, the problem is a practical one: if you design a bridge using a system that contains a contradiction, "the bridge may fall down." For Wittgenstein, the problem was about the social context in which human beings can be said to "follow the rules" of a mathematical system. What Turing saw, and Wittgenstein did not, was the importance of the fact that a computer doesn't need to understand rules to follow them...