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Why would this follow? There are many more ants and yet I can use a single word to refer to them, and certainly the biology text that defines them contains fewe
by tacitusarc 2y ago
Why would this follow? There are many more ants and yet I can use a single word to refer to them, and certainly the biology text that defines them contains fewer words than there are ants.
- xigoi 2y agoYou can certainly refer to the set of all real numbers, but that’s not the same as referring to one particular number.
- tacitusarc 2y agoI see. It still does not make sense to me that there are necessarily undefinable numbers. That is, for any given number x there is not an English sentence y that defines the number. That sentence may need to be arbitrarily long, but so what? English has more flexibility than math in defining things, maybe that is the disconnect. It seems to me that insofar English can define any number, it can define all of them. It feels to me like this is trying to draw an equivalence between language and mathematics yet disallowing the inherent ambiguity of language. At that point, the comparison is just silly.