FOM: social construction of mathematics?

Vaughan Pratt pratt at cs.Stanford.EDU
Thu Mar 19 10:35:41 EST 1998


From: Charles Silver
>This is too simple.  There aren't just two sides, there are lots
>of slightly different positions.  I think Hersh may think it's "boolean"
>also: Platonism and his view.

That's how football looks the first time you see it.  But after a little
while you realize there are two teams.  On the other hand whether the
players on one team are all playing by the same strategy is *very*
hard to tell, or even define.  In the game of espionage, the strategy
of moles and double agents is even harder to discern.

(I'm a Dualist, like my countryman John Eccles and his collaborator Karl
Popper.  However I've recently decided that Cartesianism as a flavor of
Dualism puts matter on the wrong side of the duality: it belongs on the
same side as mind.  The other side consists of the points of space and
time, which for all we know may in our universe be finite in number.)

Vaughan Pratt



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