FOM: "Arbitrary Objects" - two more remarks

Arnon Avron aa at post.tau.ac.il
Mon Feb 11 03:53:12 EST 2002


I believe that the following quatation from Fine book:

> I hold it as a general methodological principle that when there
> is a clash between intuition and rigour,
> when one's sense of rigour prevents one from saying
> what, from an intuitive point of view, it seems that one can say, then it is
> rigour and not intuition that should give way.

raises an issue which is much more important than that of "arbitrary"
objects. Personally I totally disagree. Both logic and experience
have taught me that whenever there is 
a clash between intuition and rigour it means that something is
wrong with the intuition. Rigour simply cant be wrong.

  One more remark concerning "arbitrary" objects. I believe that 
such a discussion could have never taken place among Hebrew speakers
(for example), since there is no adjective like "arbitrary" in Hebrew.
What we have is an analogue of the word "some" (in "some object"). For
a long time I suspect that English speakers are giving too much 
importance to the pecularities of their language (and modern philosophers
are giving too much importance to pecularities of natural languages
in general. Just think how much energy has been invested in
sentences like "the present king of France is bald" or in the 
liar paradox).

Arnon Avron




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