Have you sent this to Reuben Hersh?  I just did so.  Sine he is the first
mathematician referenced that seems appropriate.

Frank

Frank Wimberly
Phone (505) 670-9918

On Nov 15, 2016 4:12 PM, "Grant Holland" <[email protected]> wrote:

> Thanks, Glenn. I appreciate your persistence in reading the whole article.
>
> I think this is an important and timely article, mainly, I must admit,
> because it is in my current area of research. I'm working on a different
> thread than Mumford but my intention is very sympathetic to his. And I
> think you might agree that his main points are that we are now in the "age
> of stochasticity" and that we should now integrate "probability thinking"
> into the foundations of mathematics.
>
> To address your questions about the article, let me just suggest to
> concentrate on his section 1, "Introduction", section 5, "Putting random
> variables into the foundations" and section 7, "Thinking as Bayesian
> inference". I think that unless one is a mathematician, etc. the other
> sections can be skipped without too much loss. And even within those
> sections, Mumford has pretty much segregated math/logic-speak from plain
> English; and that one can usually skip the insider stuff when you want to,
> and still get the significance of the article.
>
> Grant
>
> On 11/15/16 1:11 PM, glen ep ropella wrote:
>
>>
>> Very cool article, Grant!  Thanks.  I started to get lost on page 11 with
>> the meta-axioms that give the Bernoulli random variables. *8^(  It's
>> interesting that the wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
>> /Continuum_hypothesis#Arguments_for_and_against_CH) mentions Feferman's
>> semi-intuitionistic ideas in the same context as Freiling's argument
>> against the CH.
>>
>> But I was irritated by his maps from the traditional subdivisions of math
>> to the primitive elements of human experience.  The geometry one seems
>> right to me.  But either he didn't finish explaining the referents of
>> analysis, or I disagree.  Analysis (to me, of course) is all about
>> _proximity_, the closeness of any bunch of things.  Differentiation being
>> about the determination of a locality and integration being about
>> establishing totalities. Although it's obvious (hindsight is 20/20) how to
>> get to analysis from the calculus and from forces.  It doesn't strike me
>> that forces (and acceleration and oscillation) are the primitive human
>> experiences referred to by analysis, as a domain.
>>
>> Also, I don't really agree with the map from algebra to recipes of
>> action.  To me algebra is about the preservation of some ... "substance"
>> _through_ transformation.  So, like with forces giving us (well, Newton and
>> Leibniz) a path into the calculus, the composition of actions in algebra is
>> a kind of side effect.  The core of it (to me, a non-mathematician!) is
>> about the preservation of some quality through equivalence (and equivalence
>> classes).
>>
>> Obviously, it would be silly for me to argue with Mumford on this sort of
>> thing.  But I'm wondering whether you (or anyone on the list) see these
>> experience correlations more as he sees them?
>>
>> As usual, I have no comment on the actual topic of the paper. 8^)
>>
>> On 11/13/2016 10:21 AM, Grant Holland wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~lekheng/courses/191f09/mumford-AMS.pdf
>>>
>>
>>
>
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