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Registered:
12/4/12
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Re: Cantor's absurdity, once again, why not?
Posted:
Mar 15, 2013 8:40 PM
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On 3/15/2013 7:16 PM, Virgil wrote:
> In article <4e23b96e-f161-4b54-b5af-0403893e2ec0@googlegroups.com>,
> david petry <david_lawrence_petry@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> On Friday, March 15, 2013 6:18:08 AM UTC-7, Jesse F. Hughes wrote:
>>
>>> I assumed that this relationship between "falsifiability" and
>>> mathematics allowed one to distinguish non-mathematical claims from
>>> mathematical claims. If not, what role does falsifiability play? In
>>> science, it distinguishes scientific hypotheses from non-scientific.
>>
>> Yes, exactly, I'm suggesting it would be reasonable to have falsifiability
>> play the same role in mathematics that it plays in science. Why do I need to
>> keep repeating that for you?
>
> The reason that falsifiability is useful in science is because
> scientific conjectures are about how the physical world works
> and such conjectures can be compared to the was the world is
> observed to work.
>
> But the theorems of mathematics are not about how the world works.
>
> A mathematical model of how the world works can be shown to be a false
> representation, but it may still be mathematically perfectly consistent
> and "true" as a model, just not a good model of that aspect of reality.
>
> Pure mathematicians are, by and large, not so much interested in how
> well a mathematical structure models some aspect of physical reality,
> where as applied mathematicians are, by and large, not so much
> interested in anything else.
>
Oddly, the two converge with what is
"true" in set theory to the extent that
foundational claims are given credence.
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