From: Brian Holtz [brian@holtz.org]
Sent: Tuesday, April 02, 2002 9:59 AM
To: alt.atheism.moderated
Subject: Re: Infinity (was: You' have to be God....ATTN: PH)

Jim Humphries <jim@nospamma.humph65.fsworld.co.uk> wrote:

> > No, I told you precisely why I'm entitled to talk about
> > six-ness as distinct from individual mental acts.  You did
> > not respond to or even dare quote my reason, so I'll repeat it:
> >   it is obvious that there is something
> >   that "an idea of 6 today and an idea of 6 yesterday"
> >   have in common.
> >
> ROTFL: the reason which I "dare not quote" is simply
> an appeal to what is "obvious"! The bad news is that
> it is anything but obvious:

LOL. You (again) dare not quote my demonstration of 
obviousness.  It suffices to repeat the demonstration below 
-- for a third time!

> specifically you have not
> explained why there should be something in common,

I *precisely* "explained why there should be something
in common". I said: 
  It's precisely
  that which led you to say '6' both times
  rather than saying '7' or '525923'.

> and what that 'something' is.

Since I've already told you it's a "concept" and defined it
as "abstraction", I'll pretend you're not just being
contentiously dilatory here and instead have asked what 
concepts and abstractions are.

The short answer is that they are the products of
the not-fully-understood facility by which a mind induces 
general properties from instances, and are themselves the
not-fully-understood facility by which a mind recognizes
those general properties in other similar instances. There
is a good discussion of "concept" in the Blackwell Companion
to the Philosophy of Mind.

For our purposes, note that the fact that we don't fully
understand how the human mind forms and uses concepts 
does not at all imply platonism (i.e. that
concepts have existence independent of minds and instances).

> Could you now clarify
> this, so that we can move the discussion forward.

You make me repeat something three times, and then feign
concern over "mov[ing] the discussion forward". LOL.
--
brian@holtz.org
http://humanknowledge.net