Re: Math Platonism

DON MIKULECKY (MIKULECKY@VCUVAX.BITNET)
Mon, 20 Mar 1995 15:03:06 -0400

Don Mikulecky, VCU/MCV,Mikulecky@gems.vcu.edu
On language and abstract concepts, computability,etc.
The March 23, 1995 issue of the New York Review of Books has an article
by Prof. Howard Gardner of harvard in which he reviews:
Pinker's "the Language Instinct"
Karmiloff-Smith's "Beyond Modularity"
and Bruner's "Acts of Meaning"
Most of it reviews Chomsky's reductionist approach, but towards the end,
the bruner book is addressed. Gardner seems at a loss to formulate
his discomfort with reductionism, but seems to see an alternative
in Bruner, so I checked Bruner's book out and so far as I've gone, it
seems to echo much of what we`ve been round and round about. Yes,
you guessed it, I think Rosen has done it much better in his
discussions of syntax vs semantics. Bruner distinguishes between
"information" and "meaning" the former being the outcome of
computation (in the Turing sense) and the latter as being neither
the outcome of computation norrelevant to it. I would challange
the irrelevance based on the last citation I mentioned of Rosen
(the mind/brain problem). The key question seems to be "how does
meaning RELATE to information or syntax?" Rosen suggests that
the abstract relational aspects of a system are realizable. That
implies to me that these seemingly non-physical organizational
patterns must be interacting with the material aspects. Rosen
claims that the abstract relational aspects of the system are
"objective". He also claims that our insistance on the opposite is
why whe have failed so miserably in solving the problem. If this
is so, then the distinctions science has attempted to make between
the "hard" and "soft" aspects (cybernetics vs art or religion)
of human activity may be the most counterproductive thing we
have introduced in the name of science. In medicine, this problem
raises its ugly head whenever we have to consider shamanistic
healing or the placebo effect. To my knowledge, the narrow
version of science that considers such matters outside its
realm has made it impossible to deal with these phenomena
without generating more heat than light. I would suggest
that until we can confront such phenomena as objects of
scientific study, we have placed too severe a restriction on science
and crippled it.
Best regards, Don Mikulecky