International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Philosophy
International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1: Philosophy and Metaphysics
Conference proceedings; Medicine -- Congresses; Science and the humanities -- Congresses; Technology -- Congresses
We have already emphasized one question which may be said to interest,
in a very direct way, both the mathematician and the philosopher. The
ideal postulates, whose consequences mathematical science undertakes to
develop, must be, we have said, significant postulates, involving ideas
whose exact definition and exposition repay the labor of scientific
scrutiny. Number, space, continuity, functional correspondence or
dependence, group-structure--these are examples of such significant
ideas; the postulates or ideal assumptions upon which the theory of such
ideas depends are significant postulates, and are not the mere
conventions of an arbitrary game. But now what constitutes the
significance of an idea, or of an abstract mathematical theory? What
gives an idea a worthy place in the whole scheme of human ideas? Is it
the possibility of finding a physical application for a mathematical
theory which for us decides what is the value of the theory? No, the
theory of functions, the theory of numbers, group theory, have a
significance which no mathematician would consent to measure in terms of
the present applicability or non-applicability of these theories in
physical science? In vain, then, does one attempt to use the test of
applied mathematics as the main criticism of the value of a theory of
pure mathematics. The value of an idea, for the sciences which
constitute our division, is dependent upon the place which this idea
occupies in the whole organized scheme or system of human ideas. The
idea of number, for instance, familiar as its applications are, does not
derive its main value from the fact that eggs and dollars and
star-clusters can be counted, but rather from the fact that the idea of
numbers has those relations to other fundamental ideas which recent
logical theory has made prominent--relations, for instance, to the
concept of order, to the theory of classes or collections of objects
viewed in general, and to the metaphysical concept of the self.
Relations of this sort, which the discussions of the number concept by
Dedekind, Cantor, Peano, and Russell have recently brought to
light--such relations, I say, constitute what truly justified Gauss in
calling the theory of numbers a "divine science." As against such deeper
relations, the countless applications of the number concept in ordinary
life, and in science, are, from the truly philosophical point of view,
of comparatively small moment. What we want, in the work of our division
of the sciences, is to bring to light the unity of truth, either, as in
mathematics, by developing systems of truth which are significant by
virtue of their actual relations to this unity, or, as in philosophy, by
explicitly seeking the central idea about which all the many ideas
cluster.
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