Okay, the test worked! So: Carl Tollander writes:
> This may throw something (light?) on the issue. > > http://cheng.staff.shef.ac.uk/morality/morality.pdf > > The reason I'm tossing this in may not become apparent until a ways into > it, when mathematical "morality" notions are used to address abstraction. Apparently I seem not to have received every message in this thread (and some of the ones I have gotten suggest that there are others in the same boat). That may be why, even after reading all the way through, I'm still not sure how/why light (or cold water, or whatever) is thrown on "the issue" by this paper (because I'm not sure what "the issue" is). That said, I think the paper's very interesting. It's been decades since I've moved in mathematical circles where "morally" was used, but it comes back to me very distinctly, and I agree with much of what the author says. Where I think she goes wrong is just at the point where, having described "mathematical activity" as "moving around belief, understanding and knowledge", and even having illustrated this with a circle of two-headed arrows joining each pair of those three, she states "It's widely believed that the big aim of doing maths is to prove theorems ie move things into the `proved' area. But I think the aim is to get things into the `believed' area--believed by as many mathematicians as possible." NO! The aim is to get things UNDERSTOOD (by as many mathematicians as possible)!!! [Well, all three are aims, but understanding is primus inter pares.] And she never comes back to (specifically mathematical) understanding again. Typical category-theorist (grumble, grumble). And as long as we're passing around PDFs, I attach a chapter on (among other things) the *in*formal logic of mathematics. Only the last three pages of the text (pp. 63-65) address (one) metaphor directly. Like Cheng (and like Jody Azzouni, whose work I quote and possibly misuse liberally in the chapter--work I would never have read if it hadn't been for the semester FRIAM spent with Ruben Hersh) I'm trying to get at some aspects of the actual behavior of mathematicians. Lee ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
