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Full Idea
The tendency to attack forms of expression rather than attempting to appreciate what is actually being said is one of the more unfortunate habits that analytic philosophy inherited from Frege.
Gist of Idea
Analytic philosophy focuses too much on forms of expression, instead of what is actually said
Source
William W. Tait (Frege versus Cantor and Dedekind [1996], IV)
Book Ref
'Philosophy of Mathematics: anthology', ed/tr. Jacquette,Dale [Blackwell 2002], p.45
A Reaction
The key to this, I say, is to acknowledge the existence of propositions (in brains). For example, this belief will make teachers more sympathetic to pupils who are struggling to express an idea, and verbal nit-picking becomes totally irrelevant.
| 9972 | Why should abstraction from two equipollent sets lead to the same set of 'pure units'? [Tait] |
| 9978 | Analytic philosophy focuses too much on forms of expression, instead of what is actually said [Tait] |
| 9986 | The null set was doubted, because numbering seemed to require 'units' [Tait] |
| 9980 | If abstraction produces power sets, their identity should imply identity of the originals [Tait] |
| 9981 | Abstraction is 'logical' if the sense and truth of the abstraction depend on the concrete [Tait] |
| 9982 | Cantor and Dedekind use abstraction to fix grammar and objects, not to carry out proofs [Tait] |
| 9984 | We can have a series with identical members [Tait] |
| 9985 | Abstraction may concern the individuation of the set itself, not its elements [Tait] |
| 13416 | Mathematics must be based on axioms, which are true because they are axioms, not vice versa [Tait, by Parsons,C] |