Truth poll

[ciphergoth]

I should really post this on a Monday but I might as well do it now. A whole bunch of assertions to do with truth that it occurred to me to poll about...

[Poll #1365485]

Comments

[keirf.livejournal.com]

But if you look at the history of mathematics you'll see that it's riddled with errors and inconsistencies. And we only adopt definitions because they're useful or because we find them useful. How can that be "Truth"?

[keirf.livejournal.com]

replace second "useful" with "interesting" in the previous statement.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

I didn't say mathematics in general was true; I said that truth existed within the mathematical world. The history of mathematics is a history of striving to reach the truth. There may be many failures, but mathematics without the concept of truth as an absolute wouldn't get very far.

[keirf.livejournal.com]

There are other viewpoints in the philosophy of mathematics than the Platonistic "there is an absolute truth" that you're putting forward.

There's the Formalist approach - "It's just a game where we select the rules and see where they lead us", which begs the question what the process behind adopting the rules is, and leaves "truth" as a rather empty and hollow concept.

Another major one is Quasi-Empiricism. If you read and take onboard "Proofs and Refutations" by Lakatos (the Kuhn of mathematics) then mathematics is about the history of striving to move away from falsity, rather than a move towards an absolute truth. Again, if all we can do is detect falsity, but we can't ever know if we've reached truth then the concept of "absolute truth" doesn't have much bearing on the subject.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_lj_sucks_/]

I was actually making my statements from a formalist point of view. The Platonic view of mathematics seems like a bundle of unwarranted assumptions.