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Comment by alphanullmeric | Hacker News Reader

There is no rigour in “cultural studies”, or any other social “sciences”. Not only is it impossible to prove anything in what is essentially the study of opinions with opinions, they didn’t even bother to verify something that could have been verified when it said what they wanted to hear. Let alone the hilarity of the journal in question being titled Science Wars. It’s like how philosophers use Principia Mathematica as evidence that they’ve made useful contributions to science. But once you remove the mathematics part of the book and isolate the contributions of philosophy - it’s useless.

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I'm not sure how one could "remove the mathematics part" without removing the philosophy as well. The two aren't divided by hard boundaries and were particularly close during early 20th century work on the foundations of mathematics. Poincare, Cantor, Gödel, Tarski, Bernays, Hermann Weyl, and Hans Hahn all published philosophical work, just to name a few; even those who weren't themselves philosophers were at least involved with philosophy, e.g. Hilbert with the Berlin Circle. There are plenty of modern examples of crossover as well, such as Kripke, Putnam, Jaakko Hintikka, Saunders Mac Lane, George Boolos...

And like before, if you isolate the philosophy in their work, it’s useless. Philosophy by a mathematician is still philosophy. There is a clear distinction between rigorous proofs and blathering about how people think, or making up a bunch of axioms to prove god (Godel). You don’t get to take credit for contributions from other fields.

How do you isolate the philosophy without engaging in philosophy yourself?

My suspicion is that most people who don't like philosophy have lots of philosophical ideas - they are just really dogmatic about them and don't like to be challenged.

Philosophy is like maths. You can build a lot of bridges with a crummy understanding of maths. The Romans did it with the most pathological notation for numbers imaginable, and lacking all sorts of basic mathematical concepts. So you can say all that maths stuff is just nonsense and you can do it all by these seventeen-hundred ambiguous rules of thumb you really carefully follow. It's just you're not actually avoiding maths - you're just doing it in a really ad-hoc, inflexible, and inelegant manner. That's what people are doing when they say philosophy is a load of bunk but they still believe a whole load of things about the universe.

Criticizing philosophy is philosophy so it cannot be criticized, the classic philosopher get out of jail free card.

Philosophy is absolutely nothing like math. Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities. Changing how you interpret math doesn’t change the physical world. Philosophers do what is equivalent of arguing that prime numbers aren’t real because base 10 is arbitrary. Philosophers have proven nothing about the universe, those are the contributions of physics. The things philosophers discuss about the universe is more akin to religion and mythology. You, again, keep trying to take credit for the work of other fields.

> Math can be proven. Math maps to physical quantities.

That's just wildly wrong. I think you should probably just try to deepen your understanding of fields you're interested in, and leave your prejudices at the door.

Sure thing. Then I'm sure you can evenly distribute seven marbles to four people, or make gold with alchemy. My prejudices must just be wrong.

All of the mathematicians I mentioned believed philosophy was relevant to their mathematical work, and that period of work on the foundations of mathematics was accompanied by extensive discussion of the work of Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, etc. Even if we pretend philosophy never involves rigorous proofs, mathematical theorems do not spring out of thin air, and saying "anything that isn't a formal, rigorous proof is useless to mathematics" is like saying "anything that isn't a finished house is useless to the process of building a house". https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/9404236.pdf discusses this in more detail.

Here's a paper by Tarski, widely cited by both mathematicians and philosophers and containing both formal and informal reasoning: http://www.thatmarcusfamily.org/philosophy/Course_Websites/R... I don't know how one could "remove the philosophy" from this work without making it far less useful to mathematicians. The entire reason the T-schema is used in model theory is because of Tarski's philosophical argument that it provides a meaningful definition of truth.

It doesn't matter what they believed. Philosophy never involves rigorous proofs. By adding them you would just end up doing math. A partially finished proof is still math and not equivalent to 20 pages of worthless babble about human understanding. Throwing darts at the page and putting equations where they land will not change that. Philosophers constantly pull from the same small bag of tricks - inserting "science" or "philosophy of <science>" or "meta<science>" into their titles, Sokaling in random disconnected bits of scientific terminology to sound more credible, and trying to claim criticizing philosophy is philosophy to avoid criticism. It's unconvincing and embarrassing to hear from the self declared intellectuals responsible for some of the biggest false beliefs about science in history.

If by "philosophy" you mean work that not only lacks a rigorous proof, but isn't even a step in the direction of a rigorous proof, you'll be happy to hear that many philosophers - sorry, mathematicians who mistakenly consider themselves philosophers - share your opinion of it. When I said "philosophy" I was referring to the academic field, which includes a lot of work that you consider math. While I think complete non-mathematician philosophers like Deleuze have value in their own way, I certainly wouldn't call them rigorous or useful to modern science.

I'm not clear on whether you think The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages falls into the "actually just mathematics" category or the "making up random equations" category. If the latter, I assure you that Tarski's proofs are sound. Here's a simple explanation of the most famous result from the paper in case you found the original proof inaccessible: https://qubd.github.io/files/TarskiUndefinability.pdf. A more general discussion of Tarski's work and other axiomatic theories of truth can be found at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Mathematics: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-axiomatic/

It doesn't matter what you consider yourself. Or who is doing to considering, despite your efforts to emphasize that.

The proofs are math. We've already established that math is sound. This discussion is not about the merits of math, we're talking about philosophy. Things like "The transfer of understanding from one person to another is not automatic. It is hard and tricky. Therefore, to analyze human understanding of mathematics, it is important to consider who understands what, and when." are philosophy. It's not difficult to separate, you're just trying to make it seem like it is to blur the lines between a pseudoscience and actual science. Again, disguising worthless philosophical ramblings with mathematics doesn't make your philosophy any more useful.

I am focusing on mathematics because I am more familiar with mathematics than philosophy and dislike seeing it misrepresented, particularly to use as a cudgel against a related field that I respect.

The passages that you describe as "worthless philosophical ramblings" are part of Tarski's results. He could not have left them out without obscuring the meaning of his proofs. Possibly model theory would not exist today had he done so. It would certainly have taken longer to develop.

Another instructive example is Per Martin-Lof's lectures On the Meanings of the Logical Constants and the Justifications of the Logical Laws: https://www.ae-info.org/attach/User/Martin-L%c3%b6f_Per/Othe.... Unlike Tarski's paper, this contains no formal proofs whatsoever; if the sentence you quote is worthless, then I imagine "There is no evidence outside our actual or possible experience of it. The notion of evidence is by its very nature subject related, relative to the knowing subject, that is, in Kantian terminology." is worse than worthless. Nevertheless these lectures have been of great importance in logic and computer science. You can see some of their impact in the citations here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=2483744927635326348

You may be unable to find any useful meaning in this kind of writing, but most mathematicians do not share your difficulty. This is fortunate, since the field would be greatly impoverished if it purged itself of all philosophy and philosophy-adjacent work. I would normally encourage you to read https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-... on the role of non-rigorous big picture thinking in mathematics, but it deals entirely with human understanding of mathematics and is therefore only of interest to Terence Tao and other such pseudoscientists.

The empirical sciences tend not to be in the business of proving. Rather, they participate in the corroboration and falsification of hypotheses by means of observation. This is common to both the social and the natural sciences. Of course, one might in the social sciences consider a collection of opinions to represent an observational sample, and then analyze this data. But the methods of analysis certainly do not revolve around further opinioning. Rather, its mostly really basic statistics, and in some cases you get social scientists doing something a bit more interesting, like quasi-experimental designs.

That empirical scientists are in the business of falsification is their view of their work, Feyerabend argues that they delude themselves.

False hypotheses like the roundness of the Earth, or the existence of gravity, or the orbit around the sun? All of which have been denied in the past by philosophers and other pseudoscientists with cultural “proofs” to the contrary?

Attaching a number to your opinion and presenting it as a fact is not statistical analysis, as social studies people have been known to do. The democracy and freedom indices are prime examples of the survey statistics that they’re known for. Or this hoax, which doesn’t read too far off from metaphysics publications.

You can hear 10,000 positivists rolling in their graves at Cambridge after this comment.

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