Posted on 06/08/2005 7:40:56 PM PDT by snarks_when_bored
Some earlier FR threads of interest:
Truth, Incompleteness and the Gödelian Way (first thread)
What?
Thanks for posting.
Welcome.
Enlightened? That's a laugh. The humanities surrendered to science fifty years ago. That's why the English department is now a sub-department of the anthropology department. Multicuturalism is the English instructor thinking he is a cultural anthropoligist in the field, only describing objectively what he finds. Heaven forbid if he should use real criticism, as opposed to the cliche that goes by that name today, to form judgments about want he sees and experiences.
The number of humanities people of Goldstein's quality is not as large as one would wish, that's for sure.
I think you misunderstood what I said. Goldstein is part of the problem, not the solution.
No, I don't think I misunderstood...I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. If you've read the article, you'll understand that Goldstein is well-versed in the matters of which she speaks.
Interesting. Thanks.
bump for later. . .when I am awake and primed. . .
There are mathematicians who say that what Gödel did is just irrelevant to their working lives as mathematicians, that they never have to think about incompleteness, or even know what exactly it is, in doing mathematical work. So you can do your mathematics and stay out of the meta-discussion. This is probably a pretty common attitude among mathematicians. And in some sense it's a natural attitude. When you're working within the discipline you're doing what can be done within that discipline. The fish doesn't have to be an expert on the nature of water.
Exactly as I have maintained. Gödel's Incompleteness Theroems have virually no impact upon what ordinary mathematicians do; after all, they only rely on theorems they can prove, not one's that can't be proved! It is the meta-mathematicians, the Russells, the Hilberts, the Whiteheads who's dreams of formal meta-mathematical perfection were crushed by Gödel's results.
Who says that anthro pology is "science? : Science as economics is science, maybe.
Yes, I read the article. She is a platonist and bases mathematics in that meta-mathematical realm of pure ideas.
The humanities, in the form of literary criticism, have already done the same sort of thing. According to one school of interpretation, you have to find universal themes and myths, as if the author didn't truly understand want he created. He was fallen man in the world of particulars, and the reader will truly understand the text more perfectly than the author by returning it to that pure realm of objective truth.
Well, relativity is irrelevant to most work in physics. All you have to know is the rules of the game to play it. Seldom do you run into a paradox.
Lovely Lady, lovely mind. Thanks for the post ... her words strike a chord with me in my hobby endeavors regarding space/time and an alternate paradigm for the nature of the universe.
Well, that's the whole point. It is a pseudo-science. Anthropologists and sociologists entertain the fantasy that they are doing science because they are envious of the successes of physics and chemistry. And this attitude has now infiltrated the humanities. And it has turned the humanities into a school of political propaganda.
She is a platonist and bases mathematics in that meta-mathematical realm of pure ideas.
Well, Goldstein makes a pretty strong case that Gödel and Einstein were Platonists. I'm not sure whether she is or not. But, either way, I don't know why you'd be displeased with Platonists. Platonists believe in the objective reality of (for example) mathematical truth, that is, that what's true in mathematics doesn't depend on what you or I or anybody else thinks, but rather on what is the case (in the timeless sense of 'is'). So no wishy-washy subjectivism for Platonists, no world in which reality is 'constructed by social groups', that sort of stuff. This doesn't sit well with you?
The humanities, in the form of literary criticism, have already done the same sort of thing.
This doesn't comport with the little that I know about recent and current schools of literary criticism. The Freudian critics, the Marxist critics, the 'structuralist' critics, the Derrida-ist critics—those sorts are much closer to being nominalists than Platonists, and most wouldn't be averse to arguing that there is no objective truth; rather, there are 'constructed truths' (plural) of 'texts', which truths are relative to each reader of each text (each time the reader reads the text!). That sort of bilge does away with the notion of objective truth.
Goldstein is not among that group.
For sure.
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