Nice Thanks for that Laura! I am reminded of | The toughest job Indians ever had was explaining to the whiteman who their | noun-god is. Repeat. That's because God isn't a noun in Native America. | God is a verb! From http://hilgart.org/enformy/dma-god.htm
On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 10:48:38 PM UTC+5:30, Laura Creighton wrote: > One way to look at this is to see that arithmetic is _behaviour_. > Like all behaviours, it is subject to reification: > see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification This is just a pointer to various disciplines/definitions... Which did you intend? By and large (for me, a CSist) I regard reification as philosophicalese for what programmers call first-classness. As someone brought up on Lisp and FP, was trained to regard reification/firstclassness as wonderful. However after seeing the overwhelming stupidity of OOP-treated-as-a-philosophy, Ive become suspect of this. If http://steve-yegge.blogspot.in/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html was just a joke it would be a laugh. I believe it is an accurate description of the brain-pickling it does to its religious adherents. And so now I am suspect of firstclassness in FP as well: http://blog.languager.org/2012/08/functional-programming-philosophical.html (last point) > > and especially as it is done in the German language, reification has > this nasty habit of turning behaviours (i.e. things that are most like > a verb) into nouns, or things that require nouns. Even the word > _behaviour_ is suspect, as it is a noun. > > This noun-making can be contagious .... if we thought of the world, not > as a thing, but happening-now (and see how hard it is to not have > a noun like 'process' there) would we come to the question of 'Who > made it?' For there would be no 'it' there to point at. > > It is not too surprising that the mathematicians have run into the > limits of reification. There is only so much 'pretend this is a > thing' you can do under relentless questioning before the 'thing-ness' > just goes away ... Yes but one person's threshold where thing-ness can be far away from another's. Newton used thingness of ∞ (infinitesimals) with impunity and invented calculus. Gauss found this very improper and re-invented calculus without 'completed infinity'. Yet mathematicians habitually find that, for example generating functions that are obviously divergent (∴ semantically meaningless) are perfectly serviceable to solve recurrences; solutions which can subsequently be verified without the generating functions. Which side should be embarrassed? -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
