Re: Extramathematical Notions and the Continuum Hypothesis

Re: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2013-January/016954.html
In: http://www.cs.nyu.edu/pipermail/fom/2013-January/thread.html#16929

FOM List,

This brings us round again to a recurring question about the
domain of scientific knowledge and a more lately entertained
question sbout its relationship to the domain of computation.

Aristotle laid down the law that scientific knowledge is limited
to universals, that there can be no knowledge, properly speaking,
of haecceities, hapax phenomena, individuals, unique occurrences.

We recognize this doctrine today in our awareness that science
is a matter of results reproducible indefinitely in principle.
I have forgotten the name for this, but I remember that it
entails a definite species of periodicity or symmetry in
the potential observations of observers distributed in
space and time.

Another dim memory I have is that computable functions are
“ultimately periodic” or something like that, but I'm sure
someone here can correct me on that if I remember it wrong.

At any rate, it strikes me that these two limitations are
very much alike, perhaps even identical in the long run.

Regards,

Jon Awbrey
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/

cc: Arisbe, Inquiry, Peirce List