Set theoretic questions like AC or CH are much more difficult for me to intuitively grok in the same way, because they don’t seem to “obviously” be either true or false. You can take either and still end up with a (presumably) consistent theory.
A case against Boolean logic
41–50 of 97 posts
Re: A case against Boolean logic
#42In one respect, boolean logic is popular because of bits. If we had ternary processors, ternary logic would be more popular. In another respect, boolean logic is popular because it's easy to reason about. The truth tables are relatively small in size and quantity. Not the case with ternary. Ternary is probably way better at modeling the real world, but the complexity could make code hard to understand. Maybe that can…
> Like, it gets used a lot in SQL Except it explicitly is not strictly Boolean in SQL because of nulls. X = Y can take the value true, false or null if either or both X and Y are null.
Re: A case against Boolean logic
#43In one respect, boolean logic is popular because of bits. If we had ternary processors, ternary logic would be more popular. In another respect, boolean logic is popular because it's easy to reason about. The truth tables are relatively small in size and quantity. Not the case with ternary. Ternary is probably way better at modeling the real world, but the complexity could make code hard to understand. Maybe that can…
From an information theory perspective, the most efficient base for computations would be e (2.718). And trinary is closer than binary.
Re: A case against Boolean logic
#44"Each statement can be true in one context and false in another." Is this statement itself true in all contexts, or only in some contexts? If it's true in all contexts, then we need an explanation for why this specific statement gets an exception from the rule. If it's false in some contexts, then there exist some contexts where absolute truth/falsity exists, so we can go ahead and use boolean logic just fine in thos…
Re: A case against Boolean logic
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If we had ternary processors, ternary logic would be more popular. Why? Boolean logic is older than its namesake, George Boole (1815-1864). Syllogisms are ancient. And we've had ternary systems, as well as others. And what does the third value represent? True and false are pretty universal when it comes to predicates, but anything in between is rather subjective.
generally a sort of Unknown though it depends on the formulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-valued_logic
Not that there's anything wrong with having an extra value "unknown", but it doesn't fundamentally alter the logic. As unknown in most cases means "it will be true or false at some point", its usage in computing is that of a singleton (who needs a word with 64 potentially unknown bits?), so dealing with unknown values as an exception is easier than permeating hardware with it. Using ternary to represent unknown is just not efficient.
Re: A case against Boolean logic
#46The article instead gestures toward a heavily conflated 4 epistemic 'categories' (True, False, Unknown / unknowable, Meaningless / senseless) that conflate semantic truth values, epistemic states, and linguistic well-formedness.
You can represent all of these distinctions inside ordinary first-order logic. You can have:
Meaningless(fact)= True/False
Unknown(fact) = True/False ...and so on and so forth.
Where's the escape from boolean logic now? If anything, it points you to the fact that boolean logic is much more flexible than the given categories, which box you, from infinite possibilities into a few. Ironically, this could be abused even better by authority. An institution could simply say 'Human rights is a meaningless question, in the context of progress and prosperity. Asking us if we're for or against it is binary thinking.'
The biggest blind spot however is the idea that a proof is a universal tool for getting to truth. This completely dismisses the central thesis in philosophy and science of analytic-synthetic distinction. Intuitionistic proof theory works for analytic claims (like math) because their truth is self-contained. But synthetic claims (clamis about how the real world actually is) cannot be proven with mathematical certainty, but only supported, challenged or revised via empirical observation.
By trying to map formal proof theory directly onto politics and psychology, the author ignores how empirical truth actually works, e.g. gravity isn't proven like a theorem. as Popper noted, scientific theories are falsifiable and subject to revision, shifting from Newtonian to relativistic contexts while reality stays the same.
Re: A case against Boolean logic
#47In one respect, boolean logic is popular because of bits. If we had ternary processors, ternary logic would be more popular. In another respect, boolean logic is popular because it's easy to reason about. The truth tables are relatively small in size and quantity. Not the case with ternary. Ternary is probably way better at modeling the real world, but the complexity could make code hard to understand. Maybe that can…
The Curry-Howard correspondence[1] tells us that every function is a proof (in the intuitionistic sense) of the proposition represented by its return type, given the axioms ("context" in the article) represented by its arguments.
This fact is leveraged heavily by proof assistants (as mentioned in the article), but is generally useful in any statically-typed programming language.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspon...
Re: A case against Boolean logic
#48Re: A case against Boolean logic
#49Re: A case against Boolean logic
#50In one respect, boolean logic is popular because of bits. If we had ternary processors, ternary logic would be more popular. In another respect, boolean logic is popular because it's easy to reason about. The truth tables are relatively small in size and quantity. Not the case with ternary. Ternary is probably way better at modeling the real world, but the complexity could make code hard to understand. Maybe that can…
In one respect, boolean logic is popular because of bits. If we had ternary processors, ternary logic would be more popular. Ternary truth values combines two dependent binary questions - do we know the truth value of X and what is the truth value of X. The second one is meaningless if the first one is false. You can merge the two binary values into one ternary unknown, true, and false but this does not really change…