Re: Platonism

From: JXStern (JXSternChangeX2R_at_gte.net)
Date: 11/27/04 

Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 21:27:45 GMT

On Sat, 27 Nov 2004 20:35:09 +0000 (UTC), Neil W Rickert
<rickert+nn@cs.niu.edu> wrote:
>Chairs, tables, dogs, cats, trees -- those are all intersubjective.

Not clear. From "Blackwell Companion to Metaphysics" article on
phenomenology, p 391:

 Husserl's studies of intersubjectivity focus in paticular on the
processes by which we experience others as experiencing subjects, like
ourselves and adapt our anticipations to those that we taken them to
have.

Perhaps what is intersubjective is not reality, but an agreement on
how to talk about reality.

>But mathematics is objective in a way that ordinary things could not
>be.

Which side are you on? I thought you wanted chairs and cats to be
intersubjective entities, as objective, one would think, as anything
could be. Are your mathematics than more real than reality? One
could look at Plato's view of mathematics that way, and of course his
forms even more transcendentally "real".

>Personally, I have no need for things such as numbers to be other
>than convenient fictions. But philosophy, as it is currently
>constituted, is unable to make sense of a mathematics whose objects
>are mere fictions.
>
>The puzzle for philosophy has always been,
>
> if mathematicatical objects are fictions, or if they are
> merely subjective ideas, how is it possible that mathematics
> can be so useful?
>
>You should perhaps think of platonism as the philosopher's way of
>evading this question.

I'm not sure they look at it as an evading. In fact, I'm rather sure
they do not look at it so. Though perhaps I do, if only in the way
that any false theory turns out to be an evasion.

>But that takes you back to the philosopher's conundrum about the
>usefulness of mathematics.

I'm not sure I really understand this putative conundrum. If the cat
is on the mat, then certain symbols which we take to represent cat and
mat are going to prove useful in representing the situation. If a
couple of conic sections intersect in a certain manner, than certain
symbols which we take to represent them will prove useful similarly.
There is a huge degree of contingency, and an unavoidable agential
perspective, to any linguistic, symbolic, respresentational process.

I see nothing unique to mathematics. The wider phenomenon is that we
can have linguistic, quantitative, cognitive processes of distal
objects at all, and that is quite marvelous, but it seems a true
property of the universe, and I'm not sure you can say much more about
it than that.

Joshua Stern