SilasBarta comments on Logical Pinpointing - Less Wrong

62 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 November 2012 03:33PM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 October 2012 03:08:33AM 16 points [-]

Mainstream status:

The presentation of the natural numbers is meant to be standard, including the (well-known and proven) idea that it requires second-order logic to pin them down. There's some further controversy about second-order logic which will be discussed in a later post.

I've seen some (old) arguments about the meaning of axiomatizing which did not resolve in the answer, "Because otherwise you can't talk about numbers as opposed to something else," so AFAIK it's theoretically possible that I'm the first to spell out that idea in exactly that way, but it's an obvious-enough idea and there's been enough debate by philosophically inclined mathematicians that I would be genuinely surprised to find this was the case.

On the other hand, I've surely never seen a general account of meaningfulness which puts logical pinpointing alongside causal link-tracing to delineate two different kinds of correspondence within correspondence theories of truth. To whatever extent any of this is a standard position, it's not nearly widely-known enough or explicitly taught in those terms to general mathematicians outside model theory and mathematical logic, just like the standard position on "proof". Nor does any of it appear in the S. E. P. entry on meaning.

Comment author: SilasBarta 04 November 2012 04:36:52AM *  4 points [-]

What about Steven Landsburg's frequent crowing on the Platonicity of math and how numbers are real because we can "directly perceive them"? How does this relate to it?

EDIT: Well, he replies here.

Comment author: Kenny 05 July 2013 07:21:37PM 0 points [-]

I was wondering what he thought about this!

While I greatly sympathize with the "Platonicity of math", I can't shake the idea that my reasoning about numbers isn't any kind of direct perception, but just reasoning about an in-memory representation of a model that is ultimately based on all the other systems that behave like numbers.

I find the arguments about how not all true statements regarding the natural numbers can be inferred via first-order logic tedious. It doesn't seem like our understanding of the natural numbers is particularly impoverished because of it.