Date: Mon, 20 Oct 1997 08:26:10 -0400 To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU From: Doug Porpora <porporad-AT-duvm.ocs.drexel.edu> Subject: Re: BHA: math's street address Howard, You raise a number of interesting points. First, i don't think Bhaskar originates the ascription of reality to things by virtue of their causal effects. Far from radical, my understanding is that that goes back fairly far in philosophy. You make me wonder whether we might say that the importance of tangibility is a matter of judgmental rationalism but that what is tangible is a matter of epistemic relativism. Tangibility is at least relative to technology so that, as you note, all kinds of things are tangible now that were not before. As Tobin observed a while back, the quality of being greater than can -- but need not -- be associated with tangible causal effects. I think, however, that exerting a causal effect is only one marker of reality. So if the number of stars in our galaxy is prime and that is just an effectless fluke, I think we would still want to say it is a real or actual feature of our galaxy. Despite the reservations he notes, I liked the way Louis proposed speaking of mathematical "groups": >group theory applies to any ensemble of things that satisfies >the axioms of group theory, whether or not there are any such things. There are groups whose axioms are not satisfied by anything actual. Therefore, the relational properties of those groups have no causal effects. Are those relational properties real? What I find ontologically peculiar -- although as I say, not peculiar to math -- is that while these non-actual groups are knowingly invented, their relational properties are not knowingly invented. In some sense, like the relational properties we invent with the rules of Capital ownership, those relational properties are actually there to be discovered. Or are they just really there? I don't know. I'm getting confused. doug porpora dept of psych and sociology drexel university phila pa 19104 USA porporad-AT-duvm.ocs.drexel.edu --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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