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2"Accepting Scientific Ideas," The New York Times, April 28,
1982.
3The first was published; the second and third were prominently
exhibited as concept art.
4There is a complete Bibliography of academic sources at the end.
5Again, see the Bibliography.
6E.g. Feyerabend wrote me a contemptuous, dismissive letter (October
23, 1978).
7A good example of mathematicians laughing at themselves is the
spoof by "Phreilambud" in Reports of the Midwest Category Seminar IV.
Such clowning does not redirect the field, nor does it become a firm rebuttal
of any professional result.
8Yessenin-Volpin and several of his proteges were participants in
prestigious conferences, whose proceedings were published by North-Holland and
Springer, respectively. Yessenin-Volpin and Isles submitted a grant proposal
to the U.S. N.S.F. in 1980. In rejecting the proposal, the judges essentially
called Yessenin-Volpin a charlatan. (Copies in my possession.)
9In jurisprudence, mathematical proof is cited as the highest
standard of proof--proof beyond the shadow of a doubt. Hilbert's Second
Problem is the consistency of arithmetic.
10Mathematical Logic (1967), page 210.
11Joseph Schoenfield, Mathematical Logic (1967), p. 4, p. 9,
p. 107.
12E.T. Bell, in The Development of Mathematics, raged against
the assumption that every culture must see the classical natural number series;
or that our culture is more righteous because it does see it.
13Although these considerations may be linked to the declared
subject-matter as its unadmitted preconditions, e.g. naive arithmetic
competence, and the naive hermeneutic of geometry as positional relationships
in the visual field.
14"Constructive mathematics as a philosophical problem," p. 137, in
Logic and Foundations of Mathematics (1968).
15Again see the Bibliography.
16This will underlie some of the cases to follow, but is far from
being the whole story.
17Blueprint for a Higher Civilization and the other
publications.
181948A in Collected Works, Volume I
19A published proof of the Diagonalization Lemma by Craig Smorynski,
using a Gödel-type substitution function, would require major remediation
not to be specious--at best. It's a question of professional courtesy: he is
allowed to get away with it. Self-Reference and Modal Logic (1985), p.
6.
20I.e. modern philosophy of mathematics--H.F.
21Philosophical Grammar, p. 322.
22Taalen teken in de wiskunde Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift
voor Wijsbegeerte 1947-8, pp. 121-31.
23Not to mention neo-Platonism: a doctrine which is no longer
studied, but which in the Middle Ages was regarded as the definitive science of
mind.
24And cf. "A Draw That Is Really a Win," in James Gleick's article
on computer chess, The New York Times, August 26, 1986, p. C1.
1Cosmology, History, and Theology, ed.
Wolfgang Yourgrau and Allen Breck (1977), p. 99.