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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:19:12 2006 |
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=================== HES POSTING ======================
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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