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.
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.