Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

a budget of paradoxes

I was googling for some information on pattern recognition, feature extraction, and linguistics, when I noticed a sponsored ad in the upper right-hand corner of my browser called Deep Chomsky. Turns out it's the blog of a retired programmer-mathematician, Steven H. Cullinane. Besides being a dyed in the wool opponent of Noam Chomsky, he's also the inventor defender of the Diamond Theory of Truth. He has multiple domains from which to spread his diamond gospel, while battling the demons of postmodernism and leftism. Funny thing is that I almost felt like defending Chomsky, even though I had studied linguistics at Cal where I had been nourished by staunch anti-Chomskians. I finally came to my senses, as Professor Chomsky is more than capable of defending himself. One has to wonder though if Cullinane pays for these ads himself or if he's being funded by somebody else.

Here's a snippet of his writing, under the title Plato's Beard versus Occam's Razor: "Richard J. Trudeau, in The Non-Euclidean Revolution (see above), opposes what he calls the Story Theory of truth [i.e., Quine, nominalism, postmodernism] to the traditional Diamond Theory of truth [i.e., Plato, realism, the Roman Catholic Church]. This opposition goes back to the medieval "problem of universals" debated by scholastic philosophers." These groupings of good against evil have made my day.

I propose a sequel to Augustus De Morgan's justly famous book, A Budget of Paradoxes, about the diverse attempts to square the circle, to create a perpetual motion machine, etc. This new volume could touch on various applications of mathematics to age-old epistemological and ontological problems, cutting as it were through all the bothersome verbiage of less adequately equipped philosophers such as Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Husserl, et al.

[Addendum 07/15/03: Mr Cullinane was kind enough to correct my error in this entry in attributing the invention of "diamond theory of truth" to him. Plato invented the concept and Richard J Trudeau coined the phrase.]