Identity Difference Repetition

At over 200 million, the population of Uttar Pradesh is now double the world-wide target population of 100 million put forward by Arne Naess.

And having exceeded 5 million, what was to be the target population of the former nation of Norway?

With some 200 Sumatran rhinos remaining, what was the ratio of rhino to hominid back in the golden age before, say, the mastery of cave fire?

A game with numbers: very human.

Metro Lucknow is about the population of metro Montreal; Kanpur about the same.

The Oslo region is about half as many as either.

And thanks to Arne Naess, Oslo philosophers are required to prove that they can use set theory to show that they can say what they mean.

Now let us compare mountains, while trying to think like the repeating difference.

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Balderdash in Arendt's The Human Condition

This is just a quote from Chapter VI of The Human Condition:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

The conjunction of conditionals is false, so the rest may be neglected. Here is that conjunction in bold:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

Placing such a falsehood in BOLDFACE may help a reader.  But it would also help to have links to those who supposed the age of the sun to be some scientific "unintelligibility" or the need for medical practitioners to wash their hands when going from anatomy or pathology lab to patient rounds (Semmelweis).

This alternative treatment of a text is rather easy using Curl as the web-content language.

For a philosophy course, it might mean that, for the first n days of an assignment period, an online text would be "plain" and then on days following would be annotated progressively as the maximum grade for a paper on that text also changed - in a downward direction from 100% to, say, 65%.  Think of it as a variant of "no student need be left completely behind."

Other variants are easily imagined for a philosophy course with a mixed group of undergrads and graduates.
Here is a variant with simple falsehoods in bold:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

Obviously for some presentation tasks, BOLDFACE will not be adequate: a stripped-down text placed in parallel or simply converting some text to whitespace may better serve ones purpose.
High-lighting what little may be true in the Arendt text is sobering:

Since then, scientific and philosophic truth have parted company; scientific truth not only need not be eternal, it need not even be comprehensible or adequate to human reason. It took many generations of scientists before the human mind grew bold enough to fully face this implication of modernity. If nature and the universe are products of a divine maker, and if the human mind is incapable of understanding what man has not made himself, then man cannot possibly expect to learn anything about nature that he can understand. He may be able, through ingenuity, to find out and even to imitate the devices of natural processes, but that does not mean these devices will ever make sense to him — they do not have to be intelligible. As a matter of fact, no supposedly suprarational divine revelation and no supposedly abstruse philosophic truth has ever offended human reason so glaringly as certain results of modern science.

But such is the work of the famed author.

Truth and web-content markup

My preference has been to work with smart languages and smart markup.  My early bias was for Prolog and I am still hopeful of using Rebol + Curl or Oz + Curl or ObjectIcon + Curl.

But the challenge of markup is marginalia - not so much notes as my preferred vertical lines, double vertical lines and lines with a horizonal "proof" bar.  Not to mention the long curly brace pointing to a question mark.

If you have tried to convert PDF to text you will know that - especially in the case of foreign languages - Adobe is no match for any vertical line running in the margin close to the text.

But the more basic issue is markup versus "plain text".  I argue that if you look at text by a poet or philosopher, there is no "plain text".  There are sections of text. One text section may relate to another through mere allusion. Arguments are not confined by paragraph indentation. Suppressed premises are critical by there very absence.

I have not wanted to retreat to text-as-array where the text becomes enumerated "lines" or enumerated sentences. Let me offer a sentences example:

This is what Schopenhauer wrote. And it is not so.

This is two sentences? Consider this variant:

This is what Schopenhauer wrote.

But it is not so.  This paragraph ...

Now I have traversed both lines and paragraphs.  Matters are worse for sentences across editions and translations.

I was in a grad phil course of a Quebecois philosopher - a polyglot - who was convinced that all philosophy texts reduce to a hierarchy of numbered propositions and our task as readers was to reproduce these propositions as a sequence of hierarchical statements.  A mono-mania if ever I encountered such.

Even if Carnap's Aufbau reduced to such propositions, a poem does not.

Two stanzas of a poem do not map as do two equations.  And even two equations sharing identical bracketed portions relate in a manner very different from two sequential equations sharing variables or constants.

A chapter is not a proof and not likely even a single self-contained argument (compare Arendt's use of section numbers in The Human Condition to Wollheim's use of section numbers in Art and its Objects.)
I continue to look at variants of reST (reStructuredText) as an alternative to hierarchical markup.

One clue may lie in marginalia itself: to embrace this form of outer-markup.  This is non-trivial.

Consider a vertical marginal line traversing sentences A,B,C and D. Suppose the intended lines were B and C.  But the end of A is "covered" as is the beginning of D. Then there is line thickness. Pen versus pencil. Erasures.

In many ways this would be more of a challenge that leaving behind the one-character-per-byte in moving from ASCII text to UNICODE (see my posts elsewhere on the challenge faced by swi-prolog, Rebol and UNICON.)

Three topics

Stephen A. Erickson opens his "Language and Being" with three questions.

I propose 3 topics, each with an exemplar:

1. The elephant and her fallen calf (Q: does she later avoid that spot?)
2. The macaque "aunties" and the fallen "old alpha" (Q: what was their behavior when the young tyrant died?)
3. The bottle-nose dolphin and the camouflaged cuttlefish (Q: Do the dolphins look for "coral" which is not coral?  Do they co-ordiante this search (lead and wingman) to detect cuttlefish fleeing/escaping the "deceived" predator? )

Additional topic: we are not the "naked ape" but the hominid who hides his pigment markings under mats and hides.  Pigmented marks on the skin are the beginning of the human.

These topics seem to be more in the spirit of Jaspers and science than Heidegger and oracular obscurantism.

The fundamental question in instance 1) is whether we have only an observed object (the calf) and mere causally explained behavior (and not an emotion of distress and then loss and grief.)

The fundamental question in 2) is whether we are looking into an evolutionary appendix, a mere dead-end, and not a stage on the way towards culture.

The fundamental question in 3) is whether dolphins understand that some coral is in fact a cuttlefish disguised as coral (and only secondarily whether they are noting a mental representation of coral by the unlucky cephalopod - or if they are observing an inadequate misrepresentation - or if they are merely forming a belief - or merely handling inputs and producing output behavior?  Can our understanding complement a causal explanation without undermining the marine science? [this as a response to Heidegger on the merely clever heliocentrism of the few astronomers]