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I am no philosopher, and only an amateur mathematician… But to me it seems that even when you consider math as just being language… you still run into the same
by sunday_serif 3y ago
I am no philosopher, and only an amateur mathematician…
But to me it seems that even when you consider math as just being language… you still run into the same philosophical problem when you consider what the semantics of that language are.
For example, you may believe that the practice of algebra is simply operations on stings of a language. But when you start asking what objects those sentences refer to, you end up asking what math is again.
- AndrewKemendo 3y agoThis is where I finally landed with this question - there’s too much vagueness and importantly no agreed definitions of what is and is not “reality” Math has no fundamental non-differentiable epistemology qua mathematics. As you said there is no meaningfully discrete, bounded “object” that can be used as a universal reference - so the fact of relativity means that even if maths were “real” I’m not even sure such a thing exists (who says the rules of the universe are uniform, or static as we’re only have a few centuries of poor observation) and if it does exist, if humans have the ability to identify it
- ilyagr 3y agoThis is a good point, but natural language has this problem to an even greater degree. What object does the word "consciousness" refer to? "Unicorn"? What makes a ship a ship? What if we include toy ships and drawn ships? "What can math describe" is an easier question than "what is reality?" or "what is the nature of all concepts a human mind can conceive of or be interested in?". Not that it's an easy question either.
- mr_toad 3y agoBut we don’t expect natural language to be as precise and consistent as Maths. You could argue that maths was invented because natural language was too vague.