Just take Ross Brady’s work on universal logic. He devised an alternative logic in which to build a set theory that allowed for an unrestricted axiom of comprehension, nearly one hundred years after Russell’s paradox.
I don’t know the book, but here’s a review. Unrestricted comprehension, at the expense of restricted logic, which is an inevitable tradeoff ever since Russell torpedoed Frege’s system. It’s like one of those sliding-block puzzles. However you slide the blocks around, there’s always a hole, and I don’t see much philosophical significance in where the hole gets shifted to.
Yes, I’ve read that review and you’re correct. Probably a bad example. Anyway, my general point was that mathematics is built from concrete subject matter, and mathematics itself, being a neurological phenomenon, is as concrete a subject matter as any other. We take examples from our daily comings and goings and look at the logic (in the colloquial sense) of them to devise mathematics. The activity of doing mathematics itself is one part of those comings and goings, and this seems to me to be the source of many of the seemingly intractable abstractions that make ideas like Platonism so appealing.
You would find Lakoff and Nuñez’s Where Mathematics Comes From interesting. Their thesis is along these lines. I read the first chapter and I got a lot out of it.
I don’t know the book, but here’s a review. Unrestricted comprehension, at the expense of restricted logic, which is an inevitable tradeoff ever since Russell torpedoed Frege’s system. It’s like one of those sliding-block puzzles. However you slide the blocks around, there’s always a hole, and I don’t see much philosophical significance in where the hole gets shifted to.
Yes, I’ve read that review and you’re correct. Probably a bad example. Anyway, my general point was that mathematics is built from concrete subject matter, and mathematics itself, being a neurological phenomenon, is as concrete a subject matter as any other. We take examples from our daily comings and goings and look at the logic (in the colloquial sense) of them to devise mathematics. The activity of doing mathematics itself is one part of those comings and goings, and this seems to me to be the source of many of the seemingly intractable abstractions that make ideas like Platonism so appealing.
Does that seem correct to you?
You would find Lakoff and Nuñez’s Where Mathematics Comes From interesting. Their thesis is along these lines. I read the first chapter and I got a lot out of it.