From the article. "Philosophers have always been divided about the roles of logic (formal reasoning) and, by extension, of mathematics. There have been empiricists who regard reasoning as just a tool to help organize the knowledge that derives from our senses. And there have been rationalists who treat reason as a mode of mystical, direct access to ultimate truths, one which bypasses sense experience."
It may be surprising to hear, wrt the paragraph above, I identify as an empiricist. A psychological (particularly phenomenological) grounding for mathematics is very important to me. That we have group theory, IMO, follows from the fact that the world affords us a notion of symmetry (including the recognition of asymmetry). I am to some extent pragmatist in that the symmetries I experience are *good enough* to be ontological objects, and the idea of Symmetry (writ large) is a limit afforded by that pragmatism. Over the last week, I fell down a Piaget hole thanks to a Jordan Peterson lecture at the University of Toronto[Ϯ]. While EricC has done quite a bit over the week to help me to move on from there, I am still left with a deep interest in how we come to develop the repositories of knowledge that we do, Mathematics especially. For me, Mathematics is a theory (in the sense of a systematically organized body of knowledge) and its theorems tell us about the experience and the intimacy of perception. [Ϯ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ4VSRg4e8w -- Sent from: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. . FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
