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On inversion and transitivity

שו"תOn inversion and transitivity
שאל לפני 10 שנים

Peace and blessings to the Rabbi,

In a lesson on the subject of majority decision-making in halakhic law, the Rabbi's question was raised as to whether there is a "thing that has no opposite." I would like to offer another example to the one that was raised –

For any division into two equal parts, the inverse (at least according to the simple definition of – "give this part of this and that part of this") will give the identity function.
Of course, one can wonder whether such an example is valid for attributes and not just for objects (and then I just gave a private case of the example from the lecture), since it is difficult to accept a statement about a person who is "half-loving, half-hating." Such statements are usually accepted if they are said in the manner of Ecclesiastes – on the timeline or if they are dismissed as the imaginations of a poet, a kind of Rachel's words – "storm and blood, joy and weeping, / wound and affliction, rest and death." However, this situation is possible when talking about a public and trying to analyze its position. This leads me to another example, which is any preference relation over more than two options. The attempts I have made so far to define inversion preferences on the nth order have led me either to a contradiction or to the need to define inversion in a way that is very far from the intuitive way (and even then, I fear that inversion will not be possible).


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מיכי צוות ענה לפני 10 שנים
Hello. 1. Division into two equal parts does not give an identity relation. This stems from the fact that the parts are equal in their properties, but they are still two, and replacing one with the other is not an identity operation. According to Leibniz, there is a principle of identity of the indistinguishable, but in my book Two Carts in the Second Chapter I argued that Leibniz was wrong. There can be two objects with the same set of properties and they will still be two. 2. In my opinion, it is possible to have a situation of love and hate at the same time. Perhaps the love is directed towards one aspect of the lover and the hatred towards another aspect, but I do not rule out the possibility of there being love and hatred for the same person regardless of different aspects (the question of whether a relationship such as love or hate depends on any aspects or whether it is directed towards the whole). I didn't understand the end of your words. —————————————————————————————— Asks: The question was raised at the beginning of the lecture as to whether non-transitive relations exist in reality. For example, there are many – The group preference relation, in many ways in which social choice is defined, is not transitive, which is known as the "voting paradox." The relation "friend of" is not necessarily transitive (if Reuben is a friend of Shimon and Shimon is a friend of Levi – we have no way of knowing anything about Reuben and Levi). Similarly, the relation "enemy of" is not transitive. The relation "knows of" is also not transitive. It is possible to define a relation of "adjacent to…" on mathematical objects (or on a row of houses on a street) that will not be transitive. And many more on this path. —————————————————————————————— Rabbi: Obviously. And did I say otherwise? (I don't remember anymore) The question only concerns relationships that appear to be relationships of order. The fifth book in the Talmudic Logic series deals with the treatment of intransitivity. —————————————————————————————— Asks: 1. We may be relying on different definitions of the term "identity." Or, more precisely, I am probably relying on a very simplistic definition that stems from familiarity with the concept in a mathematical context. As I understand it, the function X+X^2 and the zero function are identical in the field between two terms (where the field is both the domain and the range). This identity arises from my defining a function as a subset of the Cartesian product, etc. (an acceptable definition, in my opinion). Of course, if the definition of the function included, for example, the representation of the function "on paper", there would be no identity here. Also, it is clear that if we were discussing polynomials, which are defined by their coefficients, the two examples above would not hold an identity relation. It turns out that the rabbi refers to the concept of identity in a more strict sense. I am vaguely familiar with the principle of the identity of indistinguishables from a course on symmetry (Buzgalo) that was neither entirely mathematical nor entirely philosophical. In any case, I did not learn the refutation of this principle there (however, we did mention, as a basis for the principle, the principle of sufficient reason and I believe that the refutation can come from there). I have not read the rabbi's book and I know his mishnah from YouTube. I am sorry. Regarding the matter we were dealing with – even if there is no identity between, for example, "half-smart, half-foolish" and "half-foolish, half-smart," is there an inversion here? In my opinion, no. 2. A preference ratio for more than two options is, for example, putting forward three candidates for elections – Erel, Binyamin, and Gila. If the public chooses (let's put aside for now the question of the method of choice, although it may be relevant to the issue of the inversion) the preference vector – 0.3, 0.2, 0.5 – does it have an inversion? How would it be defined? "Everyone who supported Benjamin now opposes him"? Such an inversion is not well defined and does not even fulfill properties that it is logical to require of an inversion, such as – units or the composition of the inversion an even number of times is the identity. Would a reversal be considered a change in the order of preferences? The problems here would remain the same. In my opinion, except for extreme cases (for example, two of the candidates share all the votes and the third receives 0), it would be difficult to define a reversal here. —————————————————————————————— Rabbi: I lost you. Everything you wrote seems correct to me, and I still don't see the connection to my words. It is clear that things discussed in fuzzy or multi-valued logic do not have a single opposite in the sense of negation. After all, this stems from the definition of logic there. What does that have to do with my words? The same goes for the preference ratio of more than two options. By the way, I have dealt with it in almost all of my columns on the site (complex thinking. Mainly in the first column but almost in all the others). But what does that have to do with what I said?

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