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W. E. Perry scripsit:
> That is not a nominal 'definition' but a mapping of commensuration between the results
> achieved by the application of appropriate process in the case of each unit of
> measurement.
Well, let's see what you do reckon as a nominal definition, if anything.
Is it legitimate to treat "10 newtons" as nominally equivalent to
"10 kg m / sec^2"?
> The process for C.E. has been for its whole
> history the much simpler 'what he did'.
Then you must hold that a copy of an algorithm is distinct from
the original, even when there are no bound variables in the algorithm?
> > This is overspecified, and I don't understand the ground of your objection. Do you
> > not like the non-parallelism between element content and attribute value, or are we
> > back to the calendrical objection again.
>
> My objection is first the one (on principle, and for what it demonstrably does to
> render general purpose tools impotent in practice)
It seems to me that on your ontology there is no such thing as a general
purpose tool, for every document is utterly distinct from every other,
requiring a special purpose processor tailored to its idiosyncrasies.
How can you bring yourself to say that the current price of T is in any
way commensurable with the current price of MSFT, just because they are
both *said* to be measured in dollars?
> and then the other (for the
> undecidabilities and absurdities which it lands us in on instance processing: so, did
> Caesar die on the 13th or the on 15th?
Why, he died on the 15th by his own calendar, and on the 13th by Pope
Gregory's. Where's the problem? If we were talking about a calendar
in use on the planet of a remote star, the mapping between the Julian
calendar and the (@!#$* calendar would indeed be indeterminate on
special relativistic grounds. But not so with the proleptic Julian and
Gregorian calendars. If we are given a date that has no associated calendar,
then we have to make messy assumptions, yes.
> and how can you argue that there is a definitive
> answer when there are only separate, perhaps commensurate endpoints, reached through
> the application of separate processes).
They are in fact commensurate. In full generality, they might turn out
not to be, but that is in fact not the case.
--
John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com> http://www.reutershealth.com
I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen, http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith. --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_
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