[lit-ideas] Re: math question
- From: Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 8 Apr 2012 16:31:36 -0700 (PDT)
My take on it is that we have the natural, ie evolved ability to count sheep,
and this seems good enough for the empirical world as long as we don't lose too
many. Of course it is possible to imagine worlds where this doesn't work.
However, cats seem rather impressed by our ability to provide meet for us and
them despite of our obviously defective physique.
O.K.
________________________________
From: Julie Krueger <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Monday, April 9, 2012 1:19 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: math question
So from all this I take it that no one can, in fact, explain the why of the
math sequence?
Julie Krueger
On Sun, Apr 8, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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>----- Original Message -----
>From: Walter C. Okshevsky <wokshevs@xxxxxx>
>>As I must constantly remind my grad and doctoral students, your "principal" is
>your pal at school. (Kant's Categorical Imperative is not your pal.) There's an
>interesting psychological phenomenon lurking here somewhere I believe, given
>the
>frequency of the mistake amongst relatively highly educated people. Alas, I am
>not a psychologist.>
>
>But Julie may not have been making this mistake but simply using her own
>compressed notation, a la Wittgenstein [where 'pro' may mean 'proposition' and
>not 'for'], so that "if it's a symptom of how humans talk about numbers, or
>reflects some mathematical principal." uses "principal." as an abbreviation of
>"principality", and so this is Julie's way of raising the age-old question of
>whether what we take as mathematical truths are merely the result of human
>convention or reflect some further reality or realm such as might be thought
>of as the "mathematical principality". Alas, I am not a psychologist and do
>not know why professors do not consider these possibilities before wading in
>to point out alleged errors, but given the frequency with which they do there
>must be an interestg psych. phenom. lurkg here. Indeed, having often put this
>to the test in my examinations, it never once seems to have occurred to them
>that I was making some kind of joke when
what I said appeared merely facile in its expression, like when I said the
problem with K's 'Categorical Imperative' is that it is neither categorical nor
imperative nor Kant's. So another possibility is that Julie is making a joke by
using "principal" instead of "principle". Good one, Julie.
>
>D
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