4 ms·
afaik there's not even a lot of cross-cultural evidence for this, let alone cross-species, let alone pan-universal. what is or isn't considered math, or more sp
by disconcision 6y ago
afaik there's not even a lot of cross-cultural evidence for this, let alone cross-species, let alone pan-universal. what is or isn't considered math, or more specifically what kinds of reasoning are considered convincing/sound/etc have evolved a lot over history, and is continuing to do so. lakatos' 'proofs and refutations' is a nice short introduction to some of the issues involved here. long story short, what it really means to say 'math is universal' is actually pretty hard to pin down precisely enough to make anything even resembling a testable assertion
- ukj 6y agoI don't have strong feelings towards anything you've said (in fact, I read Lakatos' paper just last weekend). You could say that I agree in general. Much of what you point out is also what Quine identified in his paper "The two Dogmas of Empiricism" which is trivially the question "Is logic/mathematics empirical?". In my world-view inductive types (computations) are empirical. But since you seem to be optimising for "pinning things precisely", general consensus/agreement may not be of any empirical value ;)