[FOM] The Hebrew-English Thesis

[Thomas Forster]

Quine will be chortling his grave over this.  His views on indeterminacy
of translation are rather unfashionable nowadays but this could be the
right context in which to revive the debate.  Word and Object
(particularly the last chapter) is the obvious point of departure, and
also the essays in Ontological Relativity

              tf


On 
Thu, 3 Jan 2008, Arnon Avron wrote:

> The discussions concerning the "formalization thesis" 
> have a lot of aspects. At this posting  I want to comment 
> just about one of them: the "faithfulness" issue.
> 
>  Well, as you all know the world was created using Hebrew
> (if you do not believe, read again the first chapter of the 
> bible, and recall that what most of you read is an attempt
> for a faithful translation from the original text in Hebrew
> into your favourite language).  Therefore there is no question 
> that the language of mathematics (=the language of nature) is Hebrew. 
> Fortunately for me, this was the language in which I did mathematics 
> when I was younger. Unfortunately for me, in recent years I 
> publish most of my mathematical work in English. This did not worry 
> me at all until this week, because I was certain about
> the validity of the following Hebrew-English (HE) thesis:
> 
>  Every peace of ordinary mathematics written in Hebrew can be
> faithfully translated into English.
> 
> However, after what I read this week I realized that I was
> wrong. Take for example what catarina dutilh wrote
> on Mon, Dec 31, 2007: 
> 
> "As to whether FT does or does not hold, this is basically an
> *empirical* question, a matter of rolling up sleeves and moving 
> on to formalizing theorems of mathematics (which is, of course, 
> something that is already happening). But again, the hardest part 
> seems to me to be the precise account of the relation of 
> 'faithful expression' between a theorem of ordinary mathematics 
> and a statement in some formal language. 
>  From all the discussions on this so far, I gather that it is
> sufficiently clear to everyone that there is no formal method to 
> perform such a translation, that it is essentially a conceptual matter."
> 
> This argument shows me that the HE thesis might be wrong.
> In fact:
>   As to whether HE does or does not hold, this is basically an
> *empirical* question, a matter of rolling up sleeves and moving
> on to translate theorems written in mathematics (i.e. Hebrew)
>  into Englishg (which is, of course, something that is already 
> happening). But again, the hardest part
> seems to me to be the precise account of the relation of
> 'faithful expression' between a theorem of ordinary mathematics
> written in Hebrew and a statement in English.
>  From all the discussions on this so far, I gather that it is
> sufficiently clear to everyone that there is no formal method to
> perform such a translation, that it is essentially a conceptual matter.
> 
> Arnon Avron
> 
> 
> 
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