[FOM] The boundary of objective mathematics

[Henrik Nordmark]

On Mar 10, 2009, at 2:35 AM, Monroe Eskew wrote:

> It is not so strange.  Finitism and Intuitionism are two  
> philosophies of mathematics that nontrivially divide classical math  
> into objective and non-objective parts.

Yes and No.
It depends what you mean by this.

> (Though instead of objective/non-objective, they might say correct/ 
> erroneous, meaningful/meaningless, etc.)

Yes, that is exactly the distinction that I find interesting.

Traditionally, intuitionism simply dismisses most of classical  
mathematics as being meaningless or erroneous.
However, it seems that one could potentially take a softer stance and  
just allow for certain parts of mathematics to be non-objective rather  
than erroneous or meaningless.


Henrik Nordmark
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation
Universiteit van Amsterdam
www.henriknordmark.com