14th April 1998 : Valerie Ransford
REVELATIONS & AXIOMS
Thank you for the incredible Commensal 96.
I’m so sorry that John Stubbings thought I wrote incoherent babble. I think his babble is no more coherent than mine. Do I have to give a reason ? No. My attitude comes from a revelation, and I’m grateful to him for suggesting that I could do this. How can one deal with the statement : "The art vs craft debate is just a subject the anally retentive use to induce nausea" ? One needs revelation here, as one does with most of his oracular pronouncements.
Albert Dean’s comments on C96/22 are very helpful. I now realise that other people are now producing models, where the medium is the electrostatic field and that my not agreeing with them is a revealed characteristic of my model.
V.V. Raman’s writing on C96/37 impressed me because I too believe that maths has aesthetic beauty and spiritual grandeur.
I’ve noted, Theo, that you like there to be a point. Well, the point of all this is that revelations and oracular pronouncements from Stubbings’ to V.V. Raman’s are relevant to philosophers. What should we do ? Should we break everything that is said down into propositions ? What happens if some are more skilled in logic than others ? What are our axioms ? Do we all know what our axioms are ? Do we agree about self-evident truths ?
Incidentally, I swear I’ll never perpetrate a gratuitous display of bad taste, ever.
Valerie Ransford