The "Undefined Term" Game

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Profile Bill Walker
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Message 1427255 - Posted: 11 Oct 2013, 18:44:46 UTC - in response to Message 1426815.  

To improve the description I would add
The aforementioned weighed between 10 and 20 kilograms (22 to 40 pounds)


We all know Chris is skinny, but surely he weighs more than 20 kilos!


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Profile celttooth
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Message 1427268 - Posted: 11 Oct 2013, 18:59:39 UTC

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Message 1427439 - Posted: 12 Oct 2013, 4:27:30 UTC

As we have seen implying that playing a game with definitions is just a rhetorical attack. It is actually nearly impossible unless the thing to be defined is in fact ambiguous or a source of conflicting definitions by different parties.

As demonstrated in the topic which occasioned the creation of this one on antisemitism arriving at a common definition is really quite simple. As one can see from some of the posts despite the existence of an acceptable definition there are people who stubbornly refuse to even consider using the definition. For them it is as though a definition did not exist.

Pretending calling for a definition is disingenuous is no more than an attack om the person when the attacker knows he does not have a chance if the accepted definition is used.

It is not a new tactic.
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The origin of the Yahweh Cult
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Message 1427527 - Posted: 12 Oct 2013, 11:07:13 UTC

You mistakenly believe this is all about you and your thread. You are apparently unaware of a long line of discussions on this forum. Hence, you try to attack, but cover it up with big words in a semi-lengthy post. Face it. Euclid was right. A small set of undefined terms are necessary, for if this "game" were carried out properly, we would eventually find ourselves going in a circle. Similarly, a small set of "postulates" (a.k.a "axioms" or "unproven statements") are also needed. You mistakenly brought up "Euclid's Fifth Postulate" (a.k.a. "The Parallel Postulate"), either thinking that postulates were undefined terms, or at least hoping to point out a flaw in Euclid's approach.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ParallelPostulate.html
Given any straight line and a point not on it, there "exists one and only one straight line which passes" through that point and never intersects the first line, no matter how far they are extended. This statement is equivalent to the fifth of Euclid's postulates, which Euclid himself avoided using until proposition 29 in the Elements. For centuries, many mathematicians believed that this statement was not a true postulate, but rather a theorem which could be derived from the first four of Euclid's postulates. (That part of geometry which could be derived using only postulates 1-4 came to be known as absolute geometry.)

Over the years, many purported proofs of the parallel postulate were published. However, none were correct, including the 28 "proofs" G. S. Klügel analyzed in his dissertation of 1763 (Hofstadter 1989). The main motivation for all of this effort was that Euclid's parallel postulate did not seem as "intuitive" as the other axioms, but it was needed to prove important results. John Wallis proposed a new axiom that implied the parallel postulate and was also intuitively appealing. His "axiom" states that any triangle can be made bigger or smaller without distorting its proportions or angles (Greenberg 1994, pp. 152-153). However, Wallis's axiom never caught on.

In 1823, Janos Bolyai and Lobachevsky independently realized that entirely self-consistent "non-Euclidean geometries" could be created in which the parallel postulate did not hold. (Gauss had also discovered but suppressed the existence of non-Euclidean geometries.)

As stated above, the parallel postulate describes the type of geometry now known as Euclidean geometry. If, however, the phrase "exists one and only one straight line which passes" is replaced by "exists no line which passes," or "exist at least two lines which pass," the postulate describes equally valid (though less intuitive) types of geometries known as elliptic and hyperbolic geometries, respectively.

The parallel postulate is equivalent to the equidistance postulate, Playfair's axiom, Proclus' axiom, the triangle postulate, and the Pythagorean theorem. There is also a single parallel axiom in Hilbert's axioms which is equivalent to Euclid's parallel postulate.

S. Brodie has shown that the parallel postulate is equivalent to the Pythagorean theorem.


Face it. It's not all about you. It's not all about your topic(s). Not this thread. Not it's topic. Face it. You have made a mistake.
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Message 1427566 - Posted: 12 Oct 2013, 12:45:14 UTC - in response to Message 1427562.  

+1

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Message 1427627 - Posted: 12 Oct 2013, 16:21:16 UTC - in response to Message 1427567.  

You (Chris) have used the term "extinct" when it was already used and disallowed from further use. Point proven? Or did Chris not understand the rules?

Ooooopps, sorry my mistake :-) It is only a game though.


OK.
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Message boards : Politics : The "Undefined Term" Game


 
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