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A comment on How to Do Philosophy. Parent comment

Re:How to Do Philosophy by forgotmylastone on Friday September 21, 2007 @06:27PM (#58145)
>I can tell you what an integer is, what a square root is, and what a ratio is, and as a result, I can (by looking it up in a book and typing in the text, heh heh) prove that the square root of 2 can't be expressed as the ratio of two integers.

Not without words you can't.

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Re:How to Do Philosophy by geebee on Friday September 21, 2007 @07:30PM (#58177)
sure, but these words have precise definitions. Paul alluded to this when he wrote "in fact, it would not be a bad definition of math to call it the study of terms that have precise meanings".

"Ratio", "Square Root", and "Integer" have precise definitions, whereas "self interest" is imprecise.

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Re:How to Do Philosophy by euccastro on Saturday September 22, 2007 @11:12AM (#58336)
Define 'precise'. :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_the...

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