On optimism and opportunism in applied mathematics: Mark Wilson meets John von Neumann on mathematical ontology (Q1430117)

The author takes up \textit{M. Wilson}'s claims concerning ``The unreasonable uncooperativeness of mathematics in the natural sciences'' [The Monist 83, 296--314 (2000)] and confronts it with J.\ von Neumann's approach to axiomatics. According to Wilson, the `mathematical opportunist' seeks or engineers appropriate conditions for mathematics to get hold on a given problem. The honest `mathematical optimist' on the other hand tries to liberalize mathematical ontology so that all physical solutions can be included. According to Wilson, the alternative between these two standpoints corresponds with two levels of mathematical structure, core and satellite equations, or equations and their bounding conditions. In the present paper, the author argues ``that the difficulty to refute honest mathematical optimism is a generic one because the mathematization viz.\ the axiomatization of a scientific theory can itself be performed in a rather opportunistic fashion. In this way opportunism is pulled back from the application of mathematical structures to the axiomatic set-up of these structures'' (p.\ 123). Although K.\ Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem had proved Hilbert's optimistic foundational program to be unfeasible in its original form, Hilbert's axiomatic method for studying mathematical ontology and conceptual frameworks never lost its attractiveness. Von Neumann's ``opportunistic axiomatics'' gives the author evidence for the observation that ``mathematical optimism and mathematical opportunism appear as two modes of a single strategy whose relative weight is determined by the present status of the field to be investigated'' (ibid.). A combination is therefore able to model the research process in mathematical physics. The author addresses several issues of the philosophy of science, among them the realism problem, trustworthiness and truth, and deals with the question whether first-order logic has really become untrustworthy in physics and should be replaced by quantum logic.