Deperate straights call for desperate remedies. Apparently unable to write in any more structured way, I return to a journal format.

With the prospect of more structure I am contemplating a return to the kind of freewheeling broadly philosophical writing which I had in mind early in my experiments with hypermedia, after so many half hearted and unsuccessful attempts to do something more solid and less speculative. I must do whatever I can.

I have now come to a dimished conception of what formality can contribute to philosophy. I now think of its role as similar to the role which formality has played in mathematics over the last century. It has made a major impact, it is hard to conceive of how mathematics would have developed if formal axiomatic set theories had never happened.

For mathematics there remains a real prospect as the technology improves that machine assisted formal development will eventually become the norm. This is conceivable because what pure mathematics is normally engaged in is proving theorems, which could be formally demonstrated. Philosophical problems, however, even the ones of interest to me, are frequently of philosophical interest precisely because they cannot be answered by any well established formal deductive system.

© created 2004:12:10 modified 2004:12:10