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Article 3492 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Intelligence Testing
Message-ID: <12325@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
>From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Date: 5 Feb 92 09:17:21 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
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In article  <1992Feb2.222838.11793@mp.cs.niu.edu> Neil Rickert writes:
]In article <12182@optima.cs.arizona.edu> gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman) writes:
]>Formalism in mathematics is more dead than behaviorism in psychology.
]
] Incredible!
]
] And you had the gall (in an earlier message) to question my mathematics!

No, I questioned your knowledge of the philosophy of mathematics.  And
you have said nothing to change my mind.

] If you want to say that formalism is a wrong headed approach to the subject,
]I might agree.  But it sure ain't dead.

Formalism, as I used it in the above quoted sentence, is a philosophy,
not a method.  Specifically, it is the philosophy that mathematical
objects are nothing more than meaningless symbols and that mathematics
is nothing more than a game played with meaningless symbols.  The
formalist theory fails in that it cannot explain how our manipulations
of these meaningless symbols manage to give us information about the
real world.
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman


