On Friday, December 22, 2000 11:24 AM Steve Nichols steve@multisell.com
wrote:
> >They tried to this, but, I believe, they failed. So do many others,
> >including Chrasles S. Chihara (_Constructability and Mathematical
> >Existence_), Philip Kitcher (see his _The Nature of Mathematical
> >Knowledge_), Morris Kline (see his _Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty_),
> >and Penelope Maddy (see her _Realism in Mathematics_).
>
> What difference in functionality is there between the maths "+" sign,
> the natural language "and" word, and the logical symbol for
> conjunction (upturned U)?
If the leaders of Russia _and_ the US get together for a summit, the
mathematical operation of addition does not seem to convey what actually
happened.:)
> Same for all the other logical and
> mathematical operators. I think that maths has a psychological
> (logos = mind) basis rather than an observable, empirical basis.
I disagree. See especially the Kitcher book I mention above. I don't want
to recount all his arguments here, but that book should be required reading
for any interested in philosophy of math.
>> Not actually. Einstein made certain assumptions and deduced things from
>> them. In some ways, his assumptions were bolder, more consistent, and
more
>> parsimonious than those of others.
>
> Maths deals with generalities: "Energy is Mass speedolight squared" or
> whatever is a claim about physical properties .... sure Einstein used
> THOUGHT experiments, but Philosophy cannot claim proprietorship
> over all types of "thinking" (see fuller response to Harvey Newstrom)...
I don't make that claim. In another post, I've defined philosophy as
roughly general beliefs about life, the universe, and everything. That
said, I'm not making it into everything. (Everyone here should take the
time to tell us what they mean by philosophy in neutral terms before bashing
it.)
My point about Einstein, though, was not that he was doing philosophy at
every turn, just that a lot of his work was done not empirically but by the
hypothetico-deductive method: positing certain notions then finding out
where they led. After all, a purely empirical approach would have been just
to _stop_ with the Lorentz equation and no draw any further conclusions from
it. It worked, right? No need to speculate, if you're a pure empiricist...
But Einstein wasn't and the rest came from that.
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
My "Rand the Libertarian," published in the current issue of _The Thought_,
is now up viewable on the web at:
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/RandLib.html
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