Bishop quote
December 3rd, 2005 by WaltEric Schechter’s Handbook of Analysis and Its Foundations has a cool quote from constructivist mathematician Errett Bishop:
Mathematics belongs to man, not to God. We are not interested in properties of the positive integers that have no descriptive meaning for finite man. When a man proves a positive integer to exist, he should show how to find it. If God has mathematics of his own that needs to be done, let him do it himself.
December 5th, 2005 at 4:10 pm
For some reason this guy strikes me as someone who’s really into Ayn Rand.
Have you noticed any correlation between constructivists and objectivists?
December 5th, 2005 at 5:19 pm
Not one to let an unsubstantiated comment stand I googled the four queries:
objectivism constructivism “home page”
objectivism -constructivism “home page”
-objectivism constructivism “home page”
-objectivism -constructivism “home page”
to find the number of home pages of people professing either ideology.
I then constructed the table of number of occurences of these two words:
653 87,400
177,000 1,1760,000,000
A chi-squared test shows this to be off the scale for significance. So there is, indeed, a correlation.
December 5th, 2005 at 9:37 pm
I did the same search as sigfpe, but it looks like Randians are contrasting constructivism to objectivism. (I guess they mean constructivism in the sense of “reality is social constructed”.)
July 24th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Andrej Bauer, who seems to have a certain sympathy for constructivism actually wrote a nice parody of objectivism: Become an Objectivist
in Ten Easy Steps.
July 24th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
Well right off I can see a problem. “A is A” is an axiom schema, not an axiom. I always knew those people were intellectually sloppy.