catetgory theory, the law of identity, and deconstruction.
So yesterday I was having lunch with mlc and I mentioned to him that that movie about Derrida was opening here this weekend.
"About who?" he asked.
"Derrida."
"Who?"
"Derrida."
"Who??"
"Der-ri-da."
"Who?!?"
"JACQUES DERRIDA."
"Who's that?"
"A famous French philosopher."
"Never heard of him."
I began to think bad thoughts about sheltered engineers who know nothing outside of their own narrow field of study. (Not that I am any sort of expert on contemporary Western thought myself, of course. ^_^;) Afterwards, he sent me an email where he offhandedly mentioned that one of his friends referred to Derrida as a postmodernist, and I noted that although he and Foucault are often labelled as such, neither really consider themselves to be one. He replied, "Foucault? Isn't he the pendulum guy?"
So tonight I looked for web sites to email to him explaining what deconstruction is all about. I came across one which I found really interesting -- it talks about deconstruction as a response to the "logic of identity", which reminded me somewhat of the introduction to a paper on category theory I read the other day (Baez and Dolan, "From finite sets to Feynman diagrams"). In particular, I thought Derrida's concern over the law of identity was somewhat like Baez and Dolan's questioning the role of equality in the foundations of mathematics itself. Of course, the goals of Derrida's philosophies on the one hand, and category theory on the other, are quite different, and I really don't want to say that social constructs like race and gender are somehow analogous to a mathematical category -- that would just be silly ^_^ -- but all of this makes me wonder: what would a system of logic inspired by category theory even look like? Would it somehow be a generalization of classical logic, just as category theory is a generalization of set theory? Would it somehow more closely approximate the ways in which we (excluding mathematicians and philosphers ;) reason about the world and our place within it?
(I have heard of topos theory, but I don't have a strong enough math background to understand it yet...)
"About who?" he asked.
"Derrida."
"Who?"
"Derrida."
"Who??"
"Der-ri-da."
"Who?!?"
"JACQUES DERRIDA."
"Who's that?"
"A famous French philosopher."
"Never heard of him."
I began to think bad thoughts about sheltered engineers who know nothing outside of their own narrow field of study. (Not that I am any sort of expert on contemporary Western thought myself, of course. ^_^;) Afterwards, he sent me an email where he offhandedly mentioned that one of his friends referred to Derrida as a postmodernist, and I noted that although he and Foucault are often labelled as such, neither really consider themselves to be one. He replied, "Foucault? Isn't he the pendulum guy?"
So tonight I looked for web sites to email to him explaining what deconstruction is all about. I came across one which I found really interesting -- it talks about deconstruction as a response to the "logic of identity", which reminded me somewhat of the introduction to a paper on category theory I read the other day (Baez and Dolan, "From finite sets to Feynman diagrams"). In particular, I thought Derrida's concern over the law of identity was somewhat like Baez and Dolan's questioning the role of equality in the foundations of mathematics itself. Of course, the goals of Derrida's philosophies on the one hand, and category theory on the other, are quite different, and I really don't want to say that social constructs like race and gender are somehow analogous to a mathematical category -- that would just be silly ^_^ -- but all of this makes me wonder: what would a system of logic inspired by category theory even look like? Would it somehow be a generalization of classical logic, just as category theory is a generalization of set theory? Would it somehow more closely approximate the ways in which we (excluding mathematicians and philosphers ;) reason about the world and our place within it?
(I have heard of topos theory, but I don't have a strong enough math background to understand it yet...)