Incommensurability, music and continuum: a cognitive approach (Q884939)

The author reiterates the view that the concept of incommensurability had its origins in Greek music (or acoustics) before it appeared in Greek geometry. It is maintained that the persistence of the ascription of its discovery solely within a geometric context comes not just from the obscurity of its origins but also from a bias in our understanding of the continuum. The author believes that this bias is exposed through his ``cognitive approach,'' i.e. an approach that looks beyond the formal mathematical presentations and includes the practice of mathematics and its social context. A substantial part of this argument rests on countering the idea that continuity is a `natural' idea (the author always puts this word in quotes). Several supporting arguments are made most having to do with the complexity normally associated with the idea of continuity in mathematical and philosophical treatments from Aristotle to the present. ``I have called a `prejudice' our perception of `continuity' as 'natural' because from a `cognitive' point of view it is hard to believe it'' (p. 288). This would seem to imply that the author intends to question our intuition of continuity but the presented arguments have to do only with showing that this intuition is difficult to analyze, not that the intuition itself could not have naturally occurred to anyone thinking about matter and motion. This thematic part of the paper is not easy to follow but is perhaps not essential for gleaning some insights along the way into the long-standing mysteries of just how the discovery was made in the first place and how the shift could have been made from music to geometry (if indeed that is the case). An analysis of a text by Boethius argues that his work, though relatively late, still contains traces of the earlier tradition and can shed light on the origins of incommensurability in music.