Reply #67: Whoa - so many big words - so scawy! lol [View All]

[ChairOne]

Math is what mathematicians do.

LOL - I don't expect you to care for this very much - you're way to fond of big, important-sounding-but-meaningless polysyllabic phrases. "... as root to being able to discriminate knowledge"? LOL - that's awesome.

Alternatively, if youu wanna know what math is, go learn some. Diagonalize a few operators, figure out Dirichlet series, and solve some combinatorics problems with them. Compute eigenfunctions for Sturm-Liouville DEs, and discuss their stability properties. And so on.

LOL "pure apriori form"..... Did I say *50* y.o. hack math philosophy? Shoulda said *150* years old... Ah, the ghosts of Kant and Carnap refuse to fade... sigh...

Again and again you mistake my responses. I'm not concerned to offer a "better" definition of math - or anything else for that matter. I'm clowning the uncontainable urge you have that makes you *want* to define this stuff. There's no problem that coming up with "the one true definition" solves for you - so why bother? Oh yah, you're laboring under an anachronism of philosophical thought.

For some basic, more up-to-date ways of thinking about math and definitions, feel free to see Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations", Belnap's "Tonk, Plink, and Plonk", and Lakatos' "Proofs and Refutations". The first two are just general break-free-from-an-idiot-way-of-thinking material. The last is topically the most relevant, providing an extremely good way to think about what a proof "really" is, what definitions are actually for, and so forth.

Come to think of it, one of the best ways to get over the Kant-hangover is to go through Phenomenology of Spirit... but that's prolly going to far for us here now...

OH NO! <aghast expression> We don't have a DEFINITION!! AAAGGGHHHH!!

rofl.