concept: token illusion
concept-key: https://vernacular.cloud/0.0.1/Lr6jp6datV2cB58XejusbjUd/
Definition
This misidentification of token identity with actual identity in time and space powers an insistence that the world is discrete, necessary, computational, deterministic, mathematical.
A = A, A = B. The token illusion is another way of stating the law of identity. Of course, a token is identical to itself, but this is an artifact of verbalization, not of existence.
Arithmetic is the most basic articulation yet conceived for the indication of ordered situations. see Lewis MatWO p 251. A = A means there is one situation and one token. (Of course there are two As, but token identity allows us to treat them as the same. Many a philosopher has tumbled into this hole never to return.)
The rationalist, idealist, materialist mindset is a product of the token illusion. To counter this, learn that the map is not the territory.
The token illusion carries the philosopher from word to the sentence to the proposition to the belief (propositional attitude).
The scientist captured by the token illusion is an idealist who has convinced himself that he is a materialist. A Parmenides devolved into a Swedenborgian.
Perhaps related to Whitehead's "fallacy of misplaced concreteness".
The very idea of a proposition is an example of the token illusion. It is the idea that the syntactical exactitude of a sentence somehow gets transferred to the exactitude of the referent of the sentence. That "snow is white" and snow is white have the same degree of exactitude.
!Victor Badinage Quotes by Theme#^1c13ee
law of identity = token illusion
law of non-contradiction = negation illusion
law of excluded middle = binary illusion
law of sufficient reason = Myth of the Proven
See the Kit Fine's idea of truth-makers. Every proposition has a one-to-one correspondence with truth-maker in reality. No. The relationship is diagrammatic.
The worst symptom of the token illusion is information. Bits not its. see that point about vague electrical impulses interpreted as 1s and 0s.
Broader
this concept has broader concept X
Narrower
this concept has narrower concept Y
Related
- Myth of the Proven
- determinism