18.7 What Is A Number?


Meanings reflect networks of ideas, and therefore are personal or idiosyncratic. "In order for two minds to agree perfectly, at every level of detail, they'd have to be identical."

Math is a domain where agreement between different meanings might be best, but this agreement is still not perfect. "Even something as impersonal as `Five' never stands isolated in a person's mind but becomes part of a huge network.

"The really useful `meanings' are not the flimsy logic chains of definitions, but the much harder-to-express networks of ways to remember, compare, and change things. A logic chain can break easily, but you get stuck less often when you use a cross-connected meaning-network; then, when any sense of meaning fails, you simply switch to another sense."

(NB: On the one hand, you get a connectionist sense of linear, serial logic vs. parallel, redundant (and therefore robust) webs of ideas. But this notion of switching meanings -- which strikes me as a control issue -- is decidedly not connectionist!)


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