October 2006
Intermediate to advanced
888 pages
16h 55m
English
Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part.
—Willard Van Orman Quine
This is an unusual chapter. Whereas many of the chapters in this book deal with a specific problem subdomain such as strings or files, this one doesn’t. If the “problem space” is viewed as stretching out on one axis of a graph, this chapter extends out on the other axis, encompassing ...
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