[lit-ideas] Re: math question
- From: "Adriano Palma" <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 09 Apr 2012 08:20:16 +0200
** Low Priority **
** Reply Requested by 4/9/2012 (Monday) **
in spite of all this wittgensteinina quatsch, you may profit from looking at
what is know, mind you NOt at mathematics itself, but at what we understand of
the math "faculty" la bosse de math by stanis dehahene, mellisa libertus, as
well as susan carey developmental studies of children & numbers
as for the "queen" herself, --to me, and there is no point in arguing about it
-- those who do not see what realism, see nothing.
>>> Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx> 09/04/2012 12:03 AM >>>
----- 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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