Avoiding Red Tape Frees Up Logic (ARTFUL)

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I was sampling the Frog List Archives and noticed a thread on
"Bureaucracy and Identity" that seemed to ring a couple of bells.
I can't say I grasped all the details of what was being proposed
there, but the gist of it sounds very similar to design principles
that I derive from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce.  His attitude
toward the design of formal languages for logical purposes appears to
be that these are human artifacts crafted to an objective purpose, and
so we are free to experiment with different ways of achieving the object
of logic best, where logic is regarded in the traditional sense as one of
the normative sciences.

One of the consequences of this aesthetic is that we have no obligation to
introduce artificial contraints and distinctions into our formal languages,
unless those artifices serve logical purposes, and serve them better than
alternative artifices.

For example, it is an artifact of writing text in linear array that
"A and B" is syntactically distinct from "B and A", but there is no
logical reason to create a logical distinction between them, if all
we mean to do is erase that distinction again, much less to dignify
that erasure with the name of a "logical law".

Jon Awbrey

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