This sort of seems inevitable to me. What kept POMO on the left in the first place? The relativism it allows for allows it to be reformulated in right wing terms quite easily. — Count Timothy von Icarus
That is, if we drop the notion of truth as a valid assessment of our utterances in favour of the will to power or some such, we are endorsing the powerful, reinforcing their hegemony.
Post modernism cannot speak truth, therefore it cannot speak truth to power. — Banno
I personally view fabricated truths as deception - be it self-deception or otherwise - if not outright lies. But that's just me. — javra
Can we make progress in understanding and navigating the world by continually revising this scheme, without having to declare the earlier versions ‘false’? — Joshs
If someone produces a set of ideas and they are grotesquely misread, should we blame them for that, or should we blame the one who completely misses their point?
Pomo was never in high regard among the general population , so there was nothing to recover from. — Joshs
I think it would be better to ask what postmodernism has to say about the sciences in general, not narrowing down to math. What does postmodernism say about logic? What does postmodernism say about philosophy? — ssu
There is a definite tendencies towards "No True Nietzschean," arguments when someone transvalues values the wrong way, towards the wrong politics. — Count Timothy von Icarus
↪Joshs
As if we haven’t already heard plenty from the likes of Sokal. Reactionary anti-postmodernist chatter from mathematicians , scientists and politicians is no less common than pomo investigations of mathematics.
— Joshs
Yeah, what would mathematicians know about maths
— Banno — Joshs
Can there be a notion of progress in ethical or scientific understanding that doesnt need to rely on a true-false binary? — Joshs
Can we make progress in understanding and navigating the world by continually revising this scheme, without having to declare the earlier versions ‘false’? — Joshs
It's interesting to note that while some believe pomo can come to a conclusion that 2 + 2 = 5, those with knowledge of the subject here suggest this is a straw-man and a fit up. — Tom Storm
The notion of mathematics as objective and eternal is today being replaced, among mathematics educators, by the postmodernist notion of “social constructivism.” According to “social constructivism,” knowledge is subjective, not objective; rather than being found by careful investigation of an actually existing external world, it is “constructed” (i.e., created) by each individual, according to his unique needs and social setting. Absolutism is deliberately replaced by cultural relativism, as if 2 + 2 = 5 were correct as long as one’s personal situation or perspective required it to be correct. — Arthur T. White
There's the bit where you say it and the bit where you take it back. — Austin
the Principia Mathematica (written in 1910) is commonly known to take about a thousand pages to in part formally prove that 1 and 1 is in fact equivalent to 2. — javra
No such formal proof occurred previously in human history — javra
The subject seems to bring out antipathies the way Communism used to. Notice how Jordan Peterson uses the term 'postmodern Marxists' to rally his troupes and disparage the current era of alleged meaninglessness. — Tom Storm
It's maths I'm interested in precisely because maths seems to offer a type of perfection and certainty that science and certainly philosophy do not. My question is niche not general. If postmodernism has a tendency to devalue or critique foundational thinking, how this applies to maths seems more interesting to me than how it applies to science (which is tentative and subject to revision) or philosophy (which might be seen as a swirling chaos of theories and positions — Tom Storm
Yet, while everyone has always universally agreed that 1 + 1 = 2, the formal mathematical proof of the book by which this is established is not universally agreed upon without criticism. As one example of this, at least one of the axioms the book uses, its introduced axiom of reducibility, has a significant number of criticism—thereby not being universally apparent in the same way that 1 + 1 = 2 is but, instead, being a best reasoned supposition which was set down as axiomatic. — javra
Gödel, the originator of the incompleteness theorems, was guided by his self-declared mathematical Platonism — Joshs
What would philosophers such as Descartes, Leibnitz or Avicenna know about maths? — Joshs
Was it approximately 1000 pages or closer to about 360? — TonesInDeepFreeze
Was the axiom of reducibility used in the proof? — TonesInDeepFreeze
Then we also have "selective readings." I would place "deflationary" versions of Hegel, Marxist readings, etc. in here. They don't misread so much as pick and choose, but they do sometimes misrepresent to the extent that they claim that the original author's reading is their own (e.g., Marxists turning Hegel into a boring libertarian Marxist.)
Where does Land fit in here? IDK, it seems pretty hard to argue he wasn't rooted in to core of continental and post-modern philosophy early in his career — Count Timothy von Icarus
. He was certainly able to keep up with the discourse, and had he never made his swing over to the right, I don't think anyone would question his falling in squarely into the POMO label.
Which is funny since it's hard to see what could be more "challenging the foundations of power and dogma," in these settings than being right wing. — Count Timothy von Icarus
Here's the context — Banno
some more basic aspects of mathematics given all indications of being universal while other more developed maths do not. — javra
In any case, the proof of the incompleteness theorem does not depend on any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze
that a rhetorical question meant to convey that Descartes and Leibnitz knew little about mathematics? Or is it meant ironically to say that indeed they knew a lot about mathematics? In any case, of course it is famous that Descartes and Leibnitz are among the most important mathematicians in history. — TonesInDeepFreeze
If I read correctly from that article, it is more about power and politics. According to him, according to some PM writers, science and mathematics are oppressive systems etc. So it appears to be more critique about how amazingly correct and effective mathematics is, not that mathematics is not objective. (I'm thinking about Adorno and Horkheimer here — Olento
How one regards the significance of formal proof and formal theories may be philosophical, but the incompleteness proof itself about formal theories does not require any particular philosophy. — TonesInDeepFreeze
Doesn’t it require interpretation? — Joshs
pomo — Joshs
Can you explain this further? What is this "more primordial and fundamental" way of thinking from which mathematical 'qualities' derive? And how does the derivation work? And are "objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness" "peculiar to mathematical logic"? Why?...what they are interested in showing is that such qualities are secondary to and derived from more primordial and fundamental ways of thinking that are precise in a different but more powerful way. — Joshs
It's interesting to note that while some believe pomo can come to a conclusion that 2 + 2 = 5, those with knowledge of the subject here suggest this is a straw-man and a fit up.
— Tom Storm
Here's the context:
The notion of mathematics as objective and eternal is today being replaced, among mathematics educators, by the postmodernist notion of “social constructivism.” According to “social constructivism,” knowledge is subjective, not objective; rather than being found by careful investigation of an actually existing external world, it is “constructed” (i.e., created) by each individual, according to his unique needs and social setting. Absolutism is deliberately replaced by cultural relativism, as if 2 + 2 = 5 were correct as long as one’s personal situation or perspective required it to be correct.
— Arthur T. White — Banno
Can you explain this further? What is this "more primordial and fundamental" way of thinking from which mathematical 'qualities' derive? And how does the derivation work? And are "objectivity, correctness , exactitude and effectiveness" "peculiar to mathematical logic"? Why? — Banno
Exactly, do not make the mistake that people engaged with the "culture war" make here.It's maths I'm interested in precisely because maths seems to offer a type of perfection and certainty that science and certainly philosophy do not. My question is niche not general. If postmodernism has a tendency to devalue or critique foundational thinking, how this applies to maths seems more interesting to me than how it applies to science - It's interesting to note that while some believe pomo can come to a conclusion that 2 + 2 = 5, those with knowledge of the subject here suggest this is a straw-man and a fit up. — Tom Storm
it's nonsense then to talk about 2 + 2 = 5, because any postmodernist that is against 'naive realism' isn't trying to debunk arithmetic with natural numbers — ssu
addressing students’ mistakes forthrightly is a form of white supremacy. It sets forth indicators of “white supremacy culture in the mathematics classroom,” including a focus on “getting the right answer,” — WSJ
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