[FOM] Ontology

[Thomas Forster]

The reason for my asking this question is that - if you are
platonist  - you must have an answer to it.  And I would be quite
interested in the means used to arrive at that answer.  I am not a 
platonist, and I suspect that if I were I would have a very strong
inclination to say that they are clearly different things. But life
is full of surprises and it seems worth asking!

          Thomas


On
Thu, 15 Jan 2004, Alasdair Urquhart wrote:

> A finite cardinal is an answer to the question: "How many?"
> and a finite ordinal is an answer to the question:
> "At what place in the sequence is this object?"
> 
> The questions are different, but does this mean that
> the objects are different?   Perhaps, but the question
> seems to me not to make sense without a context.
> 
> For example, consider the question:
> 
> "Is the empty set the same as the empty sequence?"
> 
> In some contexts, the answer would be "yes."  But in
> a strongly typed programming language, you might want
> the answer to be "no."   Hence, I don't believe that
> such questions can be answered a priori -- the context
> matters.
> 
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