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Looks like, though a shame if true, since the account is more than 10 years old and presumably had a person behind it at some point.
What suggests that it is?
“The basic realism of science, then, rests upon the following claim: the Universe is such that facts can be plainly stated within it, even though the facts themselves need not be plain.” What facts can plainly be stated within this universe? Can facts exist outside the common language within which they are expressed?
E=MC^2 is true in any language, and it remains true in the absence of language.
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E=MC^2 is true in any language, and it remains true in the absence of language.
How can we prove that?
My crazy idea is basically the thesis of this article except swap out "art" and swap in "language". In my view, art is just one form of expression. That is, language predates life.
Although, language is a bit provocative, and I probably mean something closer to semiotics.
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"_Tools_ have a response to this post" is not a sensible comment that a human would likely make. It reads like a prompt to an AI accidentally pasted into the wrong place.
It is terse but the comment is sensible to me.
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How can we prove that?
I'm not going to waste my time describing the entirety of the last century of physics, or the numerous technologies we've developed whose operation depends on this being true. We don't have to prove it, it's one of the most thoroughly tested and proven concepts in existence. Read a book.
Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common language. Simply asserting that they do is the realism that I am disputing.
Also, the proposition in question is made in a certain language, and is not true in all possible languages.
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I'm not going to waste my time describing the entirety of the last century of physics, or the numerous technologies we've developed whose operation depends on this being true. We don't have to prove it, it's one of the most thoroughly tested and proven concepts in existence. Read a book.
That answers a different question. The empirical success of the equation in question is strong evidence that the theory captures something about the universe, however it does not prove that the proposition exists, or is true, independently of any language or conceptual framework. Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common l…
The proof that the proposition exists can be found in the countless references and papers referencing it, including Einstein's original 1905 paper. You can find the Wikipedia page on mass-energy equivalence here[0] and the paper here[1].
And you were talking about language, not conceptual frameworks. Obviously one can imagine conceptual frameworks where E=MC^2 is not true, but your argument was that facts cannot exist and cannot be proven outside of the language with which they are expressed, which is obviously false because observation, experimentation and science are not expressed entirely with language.
>Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common language.
Yes they can, because if facts didn't have truth independent from common language, the technology wouldn't work, or rather, would work differently depending on the language of the user. This obviously isn't the case. We can observe that the universe, made up of stars and planets that don't have language, nevertheless obey the physical laws that we express in language. We can observe that animals which don't have language behave in ways we can describe, and obey physical laws they can't comprehend.
>Also, the proposition in question is made in a certain language, and is not true in all possible languages.
It is. It was true when Einstein wrote it in German, it was true before he wrote it down, it remained true when it was translated into English, it's true in Esperanto, Dutch, Klingon, any language you prefer, because language doesn't define reality, it only describes it. Rename it Q=XZ^01 and it still describes the same fundamental and immutable fact about reality. Write it upside down and it still works the same.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass%E2%80%93energy_equivalenc...
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That answers a different question. The empirical success of the equation in question is strong evidence that the theory captures something about the universe, however it does not prove that the proposition exists, or is true, independently of any language or conceptual framework. Technologies working can test physical predictions. They cannot test the metaphysical claim that facts have truth independent from common l…
>The empirical success of the equation in question is strong evidence that the theory captures something about the universe, however it does not prove that the proposition exists, or is true, independently of any language or conceptual framework. The proof that the proposition exists can be found in the countless references and papers referencing it, including Einstein's original 1905 paper. You can find the Wikipedi…
If facts have truth independent from common language, where do those facts exist, and how do you define existence in this context?
As an example, are you hinting at the existence of facts and truths that are somehow different from the easier definition of formal truths which hold in an assumed axiomatic framework, as happens in mathematics, which itself is a framework of language?