scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2000106

Publication date 3 November 2003

Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to mathematics in general (00-02) Philosophy of mathematics (00A30) Research exposition (monographs, survey articles) pertaining to mathematical logic and foundations (03-02) Philosophical and critical aspects of logic and foundations (03A05) Mechanization of proofs and logical operations (03B35) General topics in artificial intelligence (68T01)

Review text

The secret of mathematics lies not so much in the fact that abstract theories do turn out to be useful in solving problems, but in the fact that a theory meant for one type of problems is often the only way of solving problems of entirely different character, problems for which the theory was originally not intended. No philosophy of mathematics can be excused from explaining such encapsulated mysteries [\textit{G.-C. Rota}, The concept of mathematical truth. Review of Metaphysics 44, 483--494 (1991)]. Too many philosophers of mathematics, however, actually seem stuck in the early 20th century, when explicitly foundational problems, the epistemic problems concerned with the question what mathematical objects really are, occupied the research work of some of the leading mathematicians of that time. So often philosophers seem to occupy an alternate universe in which the discipline of mathematics stopped about a century ago and then continued to represent ``a mummy of science [\textit{I. Hacking}, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1983)]. As a result, too many philosophers seem to regard everything since Kurt Goedel's results as a kind of footnote to mathematics, irrelevant to their own concerns. What is really special about the book under review is that it demonstrates a philosopher struggling to grapple with modern mathematics as it is actually carried out by practitioners. This is what the author means by ``real mathematics as quoted in the book title. He cautiously added to this explanation: ``The glorious construction of complex analysis in the nineteenth century is a paradigmatic example of what `real mathematics' refers to. He neatly punctures this attitude in his collection of essays on loosely linked topics and shows philosophers that modern mathematics poses many interesting or calls for philosophers of mathematics to follow modern philosophers of the natural sciences and computer-assisted technology to focus more on what practitioners actually do ``... to the extent that we wish to emulate Lakatos and represent the discipline of mathematics as the growth of a form of knowledge, we are duty bound to study the means of production throughout its history. There is sufficient variation in these means to warrant the study of contemporary forms. The quaint hand-crafted tools used to probe the Euler conjecture in the early part of the nineteenth century studied by Lakatos have been supplanted by the industrial-scale machinery of algebraic topology developed since the 1930s [\textit{I. Lakatos}, Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery. J. Worrall, E. Zahar, editors, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1976; Zbl 0334.00022); \textit{I. Lakatos}, Philosophical Papers. Vol. 1: The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes (1978; Zbl 0373.02002); Vol. 2: Mathematics, Science and Epistemology, J. Worrall, G. Currie, editors, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1978; Zbl 0373.02003)]. The author also tries to strip away the foundational filter that blinds people into seeing philosophically interesting mathematical issues only in the realms of sets, logic, categories, and functors [\textit{S. Mac Lane}, Categories for the Working Mathematician. Springer, New York (1971; Zbl 0232.18001), 2nd ed. (1998; Zbl 0906.18001)]. It is important to emphasize that there exist other equally interesting subjects and filters in mathe\-matical epistemology because philosophers are working with a projection of real mathematics which greatly exaggerates the formal aspects of its logical face. It is fascinating, therefore, to see a philosopher of mathematics coping seriously with the ideas of a discipline of real mathematics like non-commutative geometry. ``Straight away, from simple inductive considerations, it should strike us as implausible that mathematicians dealing with number, function and space have produced nothing of philosophical significance in the past seventy years in view of their record over the previous three centuries. Implausible, that is, unless by some extraordinary event in the history of philosophy a way had been found to filter, so to speak, the findings of mathematicians working in core areas, so that even the transformations brought about by the development of category theory, which surfaced explicitly in 1940s algebraic topology, or the rise of non-commutative geometry over the past seventy years, are not deemed to merit philosophical attention. Elsewhere in the book the reader can find nteresting discussions of Eilenberg-MacLane spaces, the concept of grupoid which is in quantum physics ``\dots nothing but the abstract generalization of the notion of transition between stationary states as defined by Bohr and Heisenberg [\textit{A. Sudbery}, Quantum Mechanics and the Particles of Nature: An Outline for Mathematicians. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1986; Zbl 0622.46052)], the Ising model, Monstrous Moonshine, KAM theory, and the issues of mathematical modeling [\textit{J. Wechsler}, editor, On Aesthetics in Science. Design Science Collection, Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, Boston, Berlin (1988); \textit{M. Morgan}, \textit{M. Morrison}, editors, Models as Mediators. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1999)]. Apart from the one on higher-dimensional algebra, the chapters that are most fascinating are the ones on ``The importance of mathematical conceptualisation and ``The role of analogy in mathematics. The first is a study of the so-called conceptual approach in mathematics which emphasizes verbal reasoning using general principles over formal calculations using symbol manipulations. It would be even more interesting to learn how the author of a truly original book on the philosophy of real mathematics would precisely cope with the paradigm shift from the linguistic turn towards the pictorial turn. The second is all about analogies: ``Mathematics is the science of analogy. Although through the twentieth century the technique of projecting parts of mathematics onto others has become totally unexceptional, still powerful applications require the very great intellectual effort of uncovering profound analogies. Some of the analogies can be made completely precise, but according to the profound insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein, André Weil, and Sir Michael Atiyah into mathematical epistemology, the fruitful ones are precisely those that resist complete encapsulation and only yield their secrets a bit at a time. ``The widespread applicability of mathematics in the natural sciences, which has intrigued all mathematicians of a philosophical bent, arises from the fundamental rôle which comparisons play in the mental process we refer to as `understanding' [\textit{M. F. Atiyah}, Global geometry. Proc. R. Soc. Lond., Ser. A 347, 291--299 (1976; Zbl 0313.57001); Collected Works, Vol. 1: Early Papers and General Papers, pp. 217--228, Oxford University Press, Oxford, (1987)]. For instance, the real Heisenberg nilpotent Lie group as a central extension of an isotropic subgroup ``... n'a rien perdu encore de son caractère mystérieux [\textit{A. Weil}, Sur certains groupes d' opérateurs unitaires. Acta Math. 111, 143--211 (1964; Zbl 0203.03305); Collected Papers, Vol. III, pp. 1--69, Springer, New York, Heidelberg, Berlin (1979); \textit{A. Weil}, Sur la formule de Siegel dans la théorie des groupes classiques. Acta Math. 113, 1--87 (1965; Zbl 0161.02304); Collected Papers, Vol. III, pp. 71--157, Springer, New York, Heidelberg, Berlin (1979)]. Similarly the Heisenberg grupoid attached to the symplectic data constructed from an abelian variety and its dual variety [\textit{A. Polishchuk}, Abelian Varieties, Theta Functions and the Fourier Transform. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003; Zbl 1018.14016)] and Johannes Kepler's work on the visualization of planetary orbits represent classical paradigmatic examples of encapsulated secrets [\textit{B. Stephenson}, Kepler's Physical Astronomy. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey (1994; Zbl 0802.01013 and Zbl 0626.01013); \textit{W.J. Schempp}, Ut pictura ita visio: On Kepler's projective line geometric orbit visualization (to appear); \textit{W.J. Schempp}, Harish-Chandra restrictions, Radon transforms, Kepler's libration, and semi-spinorial entanglement (to appear)]. Galileo Galilei did not have a theory of the planetary motions to offer, even of the most tentative sort. The observation that Kepler's orbit visualization procedure ``... is grounded on the confidence in the old theories, not on random search of new ones, and that he succeeded by not letting orthodox Ptolemaic astronomy obscure his ability to confront the planetary motion directly, should complement the concept of paradigm shift as conceived by the way of Kuhnification thinking in the Cold War period [\textit{T. S. Kuhn}, The Structure of Scientific Revolution. Second edition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London (1970); \textit{S. Shapin}, The Scientific Revolution. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London (1996); \textit{S. Fuller} and \textit{Thomas Kuhn}, A Philosophical History for our Times. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London (2000); \textit{M. Hagner}, Ansichten der Wissenschaftsgeschichte. In: M. Hagner, Herausgeber, Ansichten der Wissenschaftsgeschichte, pp. 7--39, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (2001)]. \textit{Thomas S. Kuhn} (1922--1996) started with the idea that science is nothing more and nothing less than what scientists really do. He held that history of science can be done only of periods and episodes whose defining debates have now reached closure, because the terms of the debates have been either resolved or superseded. In the Kuhnian world, the past requires the sort of clear boundary that has traditionally made the metaphor of separation in time as if in space so compelling to methodological relativists. However, closure is not something that happens only to other people, which historians of science then observe from a respectful distance. On the contrary, each historical inquirer participates in the closing or opening of the times he writes about. In the post-Kuhnian era where the sharpness of the context of discovery/context of justification dichotomy has been put into question, a novel way of taking on Karl Raimond Popper's philosophy is to tackle him on his own terms and to study whether it really might be possible to generate scientific theories mechanically from fairly raw data [\textit{K. R. Popper}, Objective Knowledge. The Clarendon Press, Oxford (1972); D. Gillies, editor, Revolutions in Mathematics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, Toronto (1992); \textit{D. Gillies}, Artificial Intelligence and Scientific Method. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York, Toronto (1996)]. For instance, Kepler's third fundamental law of planetary motion has been rediscovered by an application of the computer program BACON which is able to detect invariants in numerical data sets [\textit{P. Langley}, Rediscovering Physics with BACON 3. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 505--507 (1979); \textit{H. A. Simon}, The Sciences of the Artificial. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England (1981)]. It can only be a question of the ratio of the inductive to the deductive activity whether one calls an instance of computer-aided discovery mechanical induction or mechanical falsification. In this way, the book enables Kuhn to become routinely discussed in the same breath as the physician and philosopher of science Michael Polanyi (1891--1976), and the ascendant philosophers of science of his generation, especially Stephen Toulmin (born 1922), Norwood Russell Hanson (1924--1967), and, of course, Paul Feyerabend (1924--1994).

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