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I like and agree with both these people. The prerational/rational/meta-rational framing may help understand their apparent disagreement...
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We shouldn't be declaring who does and doesn't belong in the discipline of mathematics based on the political implications of their abstract philosophical beliefs about the nature mathematical objects. This is not good. twitter.com/HeatherEHeying…
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For a while there was a reactionary movement in India to construct a “Vedic mathematics”. It was actually potentially interesting in a counterfactual way, like what might have happened if the Indian tradition hadn’t died out by the 18th century when European math entered.
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For example, old Indian texts approach trigonometry with pre-Cartesian ways of thinking about sines and cosines. Might be interesting to extrapolate. Except that’s not the sort of thing “Vedic” math ideologues wanted to pursue. They basically wanted Hinduism in schools.
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Yes! That’s the general pattern of “pseudo-pomo”: appropriating meta-rational terms and arguments and putting them to pre- or anti-rational purposes. Neither pre-rational nor merely-rational people can tell the difference, so this is effective.
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