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Comment by teqsun | Hacker News Reader

> "Your physics lecturer sounds like a Platonist."

I don't understand what this means, but it made me envision a McCarthy-esque witch hunt for "Platonist and Platonist sympathizers" lurking amongst the faculty

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Platonist meaning an assumption that mathematical objects have a real existence, and the universe is inherently mathematical, so we can just defer to mathematical reasoning instead of observation. I'm applying the term in a modern setting, not Plato or Aristotle debating the forms.

This debate played out in String Theory were some proponents claimed physics had progressed beyond the need for observation in favor of beautiful mathematical reasoning, that provided great explanatory power. But String Theory so far has failed to deliver a theory which describes our universe. Physics still needs to explain the actual world.

As fundamentally opposed to Mathematical Plantonism, I am fully of the opinion that I am nowhere near anything but a minority position among those that hold an opinion on the philosophy of mathematics. It would be kind of hard to have a witch hunt for something so common amongst working mathematicians:

The saying that “the typical working mathematician is a platonist during the week and becomes a formalist on Sunday” is becoming increasingly familiar. During working days, they are convinced that they are dealing with an objective mathematical reality that is independent of them, and when on Sunday they meet a philosopher who begins to question this reality, they claim that mathematics is in fact the juggling of formal symbols (see Davis et al., 2012, p. 359). The Platonist attitude of the working (rather than philosophizing) mathematician is so common that Monk (1976, p. 3) was tempted to make a subjective estimate to the effect that sixty-five percent of mathematicians are platonists, thirty percent formalists, and five percent intuitionists. [1]

[1] - A Metaphysical Foundation for Mathematical Philosophy (Wójtowicz,Skowron 2022)

"In this house we side with Aristotle."

Just say witch hunt. McCarthy was entirely correct that there were a lot of communists and communist sympathizers, so many that many of the people he thought were helping him were themselves communists or communist sympathizers. Witches on the other hand are not real.

But Platonists, ironically on many levels, are also real. Sometimes complex. But never fully imaginary.

There are no Platonists, only imitations of the one true heavenly Platonist.

Genuinely chuckling.

He missed most of the actual Soviet agents, though, right? Both seem to have mostly focused building up a lie to suppress some outside-the-norm element that the guy in charge wanted to hunt. That McCarthy also managed to have some real agents to miss is not a big difference.

So you claim it was a total coincidence he went after Soviet agents? The witch analogy here is that there are real witches but they are so powerful/well hidden witch hunters cannot find them and are diverted to patsies. This wouldn't mean witch hunting is bad, just that we needed better witch hunters.

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