=================== 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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]