C[omp]ute

From: "andrew cooke" <andrew@...>

Date: Fri, 20 Jan 2006 22:39:08 -0300 (CLST)

A lot of ideas I've been reading about over the last few years all came
together this evening.

- Constructivism (see http://www.acooke.org/cute/MoreConstr0.html)

- Types (in programming languages)

- Philosophy and language

I was reading "Type Theory and Functional Programming" (see link above)
and realised I wasn't sure what a proposition was.  That lead me to
Wikipedia, which was *not* helpful and so I posted a question on lambda -
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/view/1239

The replies there were very helpful.  In particular, Oleg suggested
looking at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy -
http://plato.stanford.edu/

This link - http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions-structured/ -
is a particularly nice read the day Amazon finally confirmed that Naming
and Necessity is in the post.

At the same time, I think I'm finally getting an intuitive grasp on what
constructivism buys, and how the law of the excluded middle is intimately
related to the work of Godel.  Although, having written that, I realise
I'm less sure how it ties in with Turing's argument (see
http://www.acooke.org/cute/OnComputab0.html)

Obviously (see my comments in the lambda thread!) I'm still confused and
missing a lot of detailed knowledge, but I feel I have a significantly
better understanding of the general shape of things.

Andrew