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Greg Ransom wrote that: 
>  But I must object to 
> Roy's suggestion that this is the beginning and the end of our 
> understanding of the notion of 'formalism' in mathematics or economics. 
 
Please.  I could not have suggested this, else why would I have spent  
the past year and a half trying to develop a long writing project,  
while committing probably the next three years to it too, about these issues  
well beyond that Science in Context paper with Mirowski?  
 
Ransom is quite correct that there is a large literature on formalism  
in mathematics, which he locates in the post Frege developments as  
they have come to be understood in metamathematics and logic. I would  
caution though that this is a few degrees off the idea of formalism  
(and anti-formalism) as it developed in the mathematics community 
OUTSIDE the metamathematics-philosophy of mathematics literatures he  
quite appropriately cites.  
The outlines of this position are present in outline in Leo Corry's new  
Birkhauser book on the history of modern algebra and the development  
of the modern idea of mathematical structure. (They go to a deeper  
historical question of locating David Hilbert more coherently as a  
mathematician, and not so simply as the representative of the  
formalist position with respect to intuitionism, et al.) 
 
Roy Weintraub 
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