Paul Feyerabend punks Francis Wheen

I don’t want to get this started again, but that article was found puzzling by the editors who published it, doing so because they believed, mistakenly, that its physicist author was writing in good faith. I doubt very seriously it would gave gotten through a blind peer review anywhere.

And Irigaray and Kristeva were engaqed in much different projects than Feyerabend. They can’t be directly compared in any meaningful sense, especially in shots of such cheapness.

Jonathan – I agree that the Sokal hoax didn’t prove everything that Sokal claimed it proved – but at the same time, I think that it’s perfectly fair to take potshots at Irigaray, Kristeva etc. If someone tries, like Kristeva, to invoke Hilbert spaces in her academic work, it’s not at all unfair to expect that she should actually understand what she purports to be talking about.

Ehle, I’m sure I’ve probably read more issues of Social Text than anyone commenting on this thread. And I don’t know what you’re talking about, but if you have examples, then great.

Henry, were you reading something by Kristeva that invoked this irksome concept, or is your ire aroused from reading something that someone wrote about Kristeva? Remember how the telephone game always turns out?

“Preconceived political notions” are one thing. An unfamiliar perspective on issues of mutual interest to a scholarly community in a journal issue devoted to that topic is another.

On a similar note, I will observe that Feyerabend is one of the most frequently abused, yet least read, philosophers of the latter half of the 20th C.

It’s also worth pointing out that one of the things we do know about the universe is that under general relativity, a heliocentric frame of reference and a geocentric one are both exactly as valid as each other. As WVO Quine pointed out, score one for Papal infallibility.

(An argument that Feyerabend never made, but I like to think he would have appreciated, is that Astrology is the quintessential Popperian science; it makes twelve specific falsifiable predictions every day and gives them away with the newspapers.)

Geocentric model is more valid than heliocentric because it’s empirically observable – and without any instruments; anyone with a pair of eyes knows that it is a correct model. Heliocentric model a confusing elitist perversion.

Jonathan, I also wondered about the point you raised and went for a look. I couldn’t find an exact instance of Kristeva citing Hilbert spaces, but I did find this survey article, not a hoax as far as I can see, which seems to support Henry’s general point.

Key quote

Lacan has made use of topology to explain such things as the structure of the psychic apparatus by using borromean knots, Mobius bands, the torus, and projective geometry (the cross-cap) (see also Milovanovic, 1993b, 1994c; Granon-Lafont, 1985, 1990; Vappereau, 1988; for an introduction to topology theory, see Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen, 1952; Weeks, 1985; for non-Euclidean geometry, see Russell, 1956). In fact, in 4-D space the borromean knot of Lacan is no longer knotted. The cross-cap, which topologically portrays the working of schema R and how desire is embodied as a result of the effects of the Symbolic, Imaginary, and Real Orders, can also be presented in 3-D or 4-D space (Milovanovic, 1994c; Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen, 1952). It is not without effect when we move from 3-D to 4-D space (Rucker, 1984; Banchoff, 1990; for the contributions of nonEuclidean geometry and 4-D space on cubism in art, see Henderson, 1983). Much needs to be done in the analysis of the effects of these novel conceptions. Thus, for the postmodernists, several notions of space are currently being explored and incorporated in their analysis of the subject, discourse, causality, and society: multiple dimensional (Peat, 1988), fractal (Mandelbrot, 1983), holographic (Talbot, 1991; Bohm, 1980: Pribram, 1977), enfolded/implicate order (Bohm, 1980; Bohm and Peat, 1987), cyberspace (Gibson, 1984), hyperreal (Baudrillard, 1981), smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), twister space (Penrose, 1989; see also Peat, 1988), and topological (Lacan, 1976, 1987a; Peat, 1988; Granon-Lafont, 1985, 1990; Vappereau, 1988; Milovanovic, 1993b, 1994c; Lem, 1984).

John, not only is that article not written by Kristeva, she is not cited therein.

What kind of “blogosphere” would we have if people confined themselves to commenting on books or articles that they’ve actually read? We couldn’t even imagine the shape of that future, that’s for sure.

It’s also worth pointing out that one of the things we do know about the universe is that under general relativity, a heliocentric frame of reference and a geocentric one are both exactly as valid as each other.

There is a real, measurable difference betwen the geocentric and heliocentric systems. General relativity doesn’t make that go away. Specifically, relativity postulates that all non-accelerating, non-rotating frames are equivalent. That is very different from the assertion that all frames are equivalent – an assertion which a few minutes spent standing up in a bus will show to be wrong.

I’m defending Kristeva from quote-miners and their epigones. Sokal and Bricmont combed a lot of theory books looking for scientific and mathematical metaphors they could then argue were being used fuzzily, as they almost certainly were (nb: I never claimed otherwise). My point is simple: so? Do you think this sufficient evidence to dismiss whole volumes of work you haven’t read? How would you know how integral those metaphors are to the larger argument? Would you want that standard applied to your work?

mg,

perhaps it helps if I write A={} is a finite collection of elements from T. The union of A is the empty set. The intersection of A is X.

Jonathan,

Well you previously seemed to argue that the quotes in question were misattributed.

How would you know how integral those metaphors are to the larger argument?

Judging by the couple paragraphs surrounding the topology quote, it’s not at all integral to the larger argument, which makes one wonder what it’s doing there in the first place(the same goes for “discrete energy” which has unclear meaning, and again, no relevance, or so it would seem).

I’d argue that it makes sense to tentatively conclude that if some portions of the text evidently aren’t thought through, others aren’t either.

Would you want that standard applied to your work?

Whether I liked it or not, it was every time I submitted work in, say, my undergrad Analysis course.

I realize that you didn’t ask me specifically, but I of course would like a PhD in Physics from a good university to proofread everything I write.

mg: {} is a collection of elements of T, even if it consists of zero elements from T.

Axiom 3: The intersection of a finite number of sets in T is also in T.

Axiom 4: The union of an arbitrary number of sets in T is also in T.

The union of the empty collection {} is the union of exactly zero sets in T. By the definition of the union of a collection, it is trivially the empty set.

The intersection of the empty collection {} is the intersection of exactly zero sets in T. By the definition of the intersection of a collection, it is–not so trivially–the full set X.

Pedro — I think I understand what you’re saying now.

A question, though. A reasonable(I think) definition of intersection of a collection C is

{x|((c is in C) => (x is in c))}

Now if C={}, the intersection of all the elements of C would be X if the definition were

{x in X|((c is in C) => (x is in c))}

That’s reasonable enough, but it’s not generally understood that that’s the definition.

I think that that’s the reason the first two axioms are included.

mg–I think you got it. But your first definition needs to have a universe of discourse implicit in it. Allowing elements to vary indefinitely gives rise to troubling paradoxes in set theory. The reasonable definition for the intersection of a collection of subsets of X is indeed your second definition.

Pedro — thanks for your time, BTW.

mg: no problem!

“Actually, the two first two axioms listed in the link are totally unnecessary. Since the empty collection of sets is a collection of sets (and it is indeed finite), then the first two axioms are consequences of the last two.”

NO NO NO!

Suppose you don’t have the first axiom. Then {X} would be a topological space.

Or suppose you don’t have the second axiom. Then {e} would be a topological space (where e is an empty set).

So the first two axioms are not redundant.

Andrew is right.

“There’s nothing more frustrating than to read a book by someone who shares several of your pet aversions (trickle down economics, Deepak Chopra, obscurantist literary theory), but who isn’t bright enough to say anything interesting or non-trivial about them.”

Heaven forfend that anyone try to show a broader audience than, say, academics and socialists why these ideas might be wrong.

And heaven twice forfend that anyone should put together a bunch of arguments well known to professionals in a single place, in a work of popular journalism – they might run the risk of not titillating your sensibilities.

“nothing more frustrating”?

You really are the most pretentious ass!

Brad, my way of putting the same point that Henry makes above, is that Feyerabend is arguing against the implicit authoritarianism of Popper. I don’t use the expression ‘authoritarian’ as a pejorative, only as the description of a project.

Popper great self professed motivation was to seek to demarcate science from nonsense – or non-science. Examples of the former being physics of the latter Marxism and Psychoanalysis. Feyerabend argues that Popper fails and that the project to come up with rules of demarcation is doomed to failure – that one cannot successfully tie down the refined professional commonsense by which scientific consensus moves to a set of rules.

There ain’t nothing that you can say in advance isn’t scientific. It requires judgement to decide whether something is scientifically plausible or not, you won’t succeed if you try to legislate the boundary with rules. That’s what I always took to be his argument. Seems to me that he won it too.

“Suppose one had written, “The intersection of a finite number of sets X1, X2, …, Xn in T is also in T.” I think most mathematicians would find it pedantic if someone said, “Well n could be equal to 0.” ”

While I like the inclusions of axioms one and two for the sake of clarity, All of my professors and most of my fellow grad students would have no problem saying n could be zero. It certainly wouldn’t be the most pedantic thing we had ever done.

What Andrew C. said – not only is the Wheen book written to flatter the prejudices of those who already agree with him, it’s pretentious to boot, promiscuously dropping the names of Marx, Tawney, Hume etc at every opportunity. Frankly, it’s you who is being condescending here, by assuming that a book written for a popular audience can’t be intelligent and say interesting things. If anyone’s looking for a popular book that addresses some of the same topics but is well written and smart, I can’t recommend John Sladek’s The New Apocrypha enough. It’s a little outdated at this stage – but UFO cultism, homeopathy etc are hardy perennials. I only wish he’d had a chance to write about David Icke before he died.

Pedro, the Wolfram defintions are indeed slightly unparsimonious. As Wikipedia and others do you could insist only that intersections of pairs of elements in T were also in T and then deduce that finite, in the sense of one or more, intersections were also in T.

However the Wolfram definitions do not imply that X is in T, we don’t know that every element of X is contained in an element of T, nor is it necessarily usual to insist that zero is a finite number in situations like this. By your definition the statement “All finites subsets of elements of T contain only elements of T” would fail if T didn’t have the empty set as an elemnt. Basically intersection is not defined for less than two subsets. These distinctions can become important in various constructions and abstractions.

dk.au, you’ve seen someone take an inch and accused them of taking a mile. If your rephrase is what they meant I’m sure they would have said it.

Yeah, jack is right. Though zero is indeed a finite number, it often behaves exceptionally and should be treated differently. For instance, are intersections of finite sets finite? I think you should say yes, rather than a pedro flavoured “no”.

Besides, a minimal set of axioms is by no means the most desirable and clarity should trump parsimony every time.

Walt, I think you actually are being a little unfair to that quote. It seems pretty inarguable that whether a mathematical problem is solved may depend not only on its intrinsic difficulty but on how much effort is spent on it. Hayles attributes to Irigaray a sociological explanation of why more collective effort has been spent on solid than on fluid mechanics. That explanation wouldn’t entail that any individual would be more skilled at any particular problem.

Now, I doubt that Irigaray has done the research to establish the truth of this explanation, and I suspect that she’s talking through her hat somewhat. The linked author seems to think that there are also valid points to be made about whether progress could be made on the problem with cellular automata, circumventing the Navier-Stokes equations. The whole New Kind of Science thing makes me suspicious here, though.

armando: intersections of finite sets are indeed finite! It is intersections of the empty collection of subsets of a set X that behaves oddly.

But pedro, what about intersections of finite subsets of the natural numbers? You can be consistent here only at the cost of having to say some pretty horribly unituitive things.

I’m pretty sure we utlimately agree here, and its not that you are incorrect – you are perfectly correct, actually – but the point you make is awful in terms of clarity. I reckon that your point about excluding zero being artificial is where I have the complaint – it seems pretty natural to me.

Pedro,

You’re inadvertently supporting the general thrust that one shouldn’t critique areas where one is insufficiently knowledgable. ‘Course the stands of blog are a smidge lower than academic ones so we’ll likely let it slide. :)

I’ll clear things up as best I can. Consider the set S = {x, y, z}. Here are some topologies on S:

1) the simple topology T1:
{}, {x, y, z}

2) the discrete topology T2:
{}, {x}, {y}, {z}, {x,y}, {x,y}, {y,z}, {x,y,z}

3) another topology T3:

{}, {x}, {x,y}, {x,y,z}

Note that each of them contain the empty set {} and the entire space {x,y,z}. Note further that if you intersect any finite number of them you get a set that is already listed. Finally note that if you intersect any number of then you get a set that is already listed.

The following is not a topology of S:

{x}, {x,y}, {x,y,z}

because it does not contain the empty set. Note that no combination of intersection or union operations on the above sets will yield the empty set, because x is an element of each of them.

Lastly, consider the following non-topology of S:

{}, {x}, {y}, {x,y}

This does not contain S={x,y,z} and you cannot construct S from it because none of the above sets contain z.

Cheers,
Scott

andrew–no problem.
armando: good catch. Intersections of nonempty collections of finite subsets are finite.
scott swank: what on earth gives you the idea that it is I who is insufficiently knowledgeable about these matters?

The more substantive point: People can be incredibly pedantic and possessive about their field of work. I was particularly disgusted by the quotes I read in Sokal’s attack on postmodernist mumbo-jumbo. But as soon as I educated myself a bit more on particular trends in literary criticism, I learned not to be quite as dismissive as others are about some of the ideas circulating in English departments. I still feel a general repulsion for Lacan, and more generally for theory, as it is articulated by its exponents: Zizek, Derrida, etc. And yet, I seriously believe that new historicist scholars of the Renaissance–for example–are very illuminating to read, and that the underlying assumptions about the dynamics of culture that operate in their work are far more sensible than one would expect from reading the quotes selected by Sokal.

pedro I actually agreed with you that Wolfram’s axioms were slightly sloppy. However you still need at least three — you can’t deduce that X is in T — and actually it is undesirable to use a definition of intersection that lets the empty set in through the back door.

For preference the axioms should make it transparent that the topology is a lattice and rolling the null set axiom into the intersection/closure algorithm is not helpful. Nor does it work well with the dual definition. It is for that reason that I preferred the Wikipedia version.

scott: I’m afraid I didn’t say that the intersection of the empty collection of subsets of X is empty, but that it is the entire underlying set X. mg wrote down somewhere on the thread a perfectly reasonable definition for the intersection of an arbitrary collection C of subsets of a set X:

{x in X|((c is in C) => (x is in c))}

If the collection C is empty, then the implication in the definition is true for any x in X. Hence every element x in X belongs to the intersection of the collection.

jack: I believe it perfectly sensible to say that the infimum over the empty set of real numbers is positive infinity (which is a piece of folklore about the empty set with which many people are familiar).

I believe any peculiarity arising from the inclusion of the empty collection can be avoided by quantifying over nonempty collections. For example, it is not uncommon to say that a vector lattice X is Dedekind-complete if every nonempty subset of it has an infimum and a supremum in X.

Granted, you can make a choice. You can have aversion to quantification over empty collections, and save yourself the trouble of thinking about them. Some people, however, are extraordinarily careful about the empty set. I know of at least one outstanding mathematician who cannot stand it when he discovers that the “theorem” written on the blackboard has a trivial counterexample.

Defenders of Larry Summers point out that it is likely that there are differences between the brains of men and women and logically possible that these could have a role in explaining the lack of women in science departments. So he is not, prima facie, wrong.

However in making his statement he has seemingly ignored what people who have considered this rather old notion have found out and has implicitly deprioritised tackling other factors where it seems more likely that progress could be made On balance he seems to be at odds with current knowledge and therefore unable to make his argument stand up.

From someone in his position and with his credentials we might have hoped less philistine.

I think the negative feelings his statements aroused are similar to those aroused in people sympathetic to Sokal et al. I’m sure that as with Derrida, at some level the man himself is much less idiotic than his travestied received persona. It is not clear that the travessties in this case are any less serious from a philosphicalpoint of view than is pop Popper but pop Popperians don’t pick on Physics or maths much.

I wonder if the whole difficulty actually arises because maths is much more familiar to the French and they therefore feel more able to play fast and loose with it. It is impossible to get far in the French educational system without doing quite a lot of maths. France is one of the few countries in the world where mathsis a cool subject that might get you dates. (Singapore and the former Soviet Union being the only other examples that spring to mind)

BTW the cellular automaton example is a crock. Like fractals, they were useless computationaly until the advent of the digital computer. They were invented by one of the inventors of both the atomic bomb itself and the strategy used to deploy it. The discoverers of the application of cellular automata to fluid dynamcs were men.

There might be significant gender relate issues with maths but better examples are needed. PZ Myers point that the brain is not hardwired for advanced math and the novelty of discoveries in the field mean both that any gender differences are extremely subtle and that knowing what would have been different if more mathematicians had been women is extremely difficult.

In any case while the example of men being solid while women are fluid is plausible if stereotyped, the extension of this metaphor to turbulence seems forced.

I guess it’s appropriate that a post about Feyerabend, that great philosophical troll (not that that’s a bad thing at all) also allows Adequacy.org to continue trolling people three years after it shut down. Surely it’s obvious that that article is a joke from the moement it refers to Wolfram as a ‘noted genius’?

Oh, and BTW, if you want a French philosopher who uses maths (in particular, set theory) and knows what he’s talking about, check out Alain Badiou. His Lacanian discussion of non-constructible sets is very good indeed.

Jonathan quotes this news story
under the title:”Today’s Irrelevant Clause”

In Trier, Germany, birthplace of Karl Marx, the prosecutor’s office has been investigating the claim of a woman that babies were being cut up and eaten in Satanist rituals.

As I tried to remind him, it’s a story. The mention of Marx is merely a means to pull people in; It’s a rhetorical device, a little silly but as I noted, if Walt Disney had been born in Trier they might have used him.

It is in fact very hard to tell what part of any structure is irrelevent to its function. Do do so you have to decide what that function is. What is the function of a news story?
To communicated factual information? To entertain? To make money for the publisher?

I find very little difference between any of you, and your arguments, between Sokal and the idiots at Social Text. All of you are trying to find ways to turn ambiguity into something managable, something concrete, something to which you can apply simple numbers and/or rules. What is economics but a set of assumptions? At what point do those assumptions become unsupportable? You all find ways to generalize from specific cases, and you do it in ways that are either over-simple or perfectly arcane.
You might as well be race car mechanics.

None of you value the specifics of things, the tastes and smells. A cook deals in specifics, an actor deals in specifics, a lawyer deals in specifics. A poet writes in untranslatable specifics. But for the academy everything must fit within a generalization. And when the generalization defines the thing, the thing, as a specificity, no longer exists. And what’s worse, every mediocre graduate student and cow-town professor must be able to make such generalizations. Every holder of a Ph.D must be able not only to teach important problems but to solve them!. Every assistant professor must have an original mind. And they don’t.

My mother gives perhaps the worst performance of Bach on the piano that I have ever heard. She plays the notes, unable or unwilling to take the indulgence of adding any variation, any idiosyncratic gesture that might make the playing personal. She refuses to perform as if by performing she would become merely a specific thing in time, a part of the world, unaware, un-intellectual.

If you can’t understand specifics your generalizations will be meaningless. And if you can’t play Bach as if you wrote the music yourself you’ll never understand the music he wrote.

The value of this is what Alan Sokal disputes. And what disgusts me is that nervous professors in the humanities are worried that he’s right. Why else would they indulge in pseudoscientific bullshit except in a desperate attempt to find a way to say that they too are worthy of respect.

Jonathan Goodwin <http://www.jgoodwin.net/index.php?p=45“>quotes this news story
under the title:”Today’s Irrelevant Clause”

In Trier, Germany, birthplace of Karl Marx, the prosecutor’s office has been investigating the claim of a woman that babies were being cut up and eaten in Satanist rituals.

As I tried to remind him, it’s a story. The mention of Marx is merely a means to pull people in; It’s a rhetorical device, a little silly but as I noted, if Walt Disney had been born in Trier they might have used him.

It is in fact very hard to tell what part of any structure is irrelevent to its function. Do do so you have to decide what that function is. What is the function of a news story,
to communicated factual information? To entertain? To make money for the publisher?

I find very little difference between any of you, and your arguments, between Sokal and the idiots at Social Text. All of you are trying to find ways to turn ambiguity into something managable, something concrete, something to which you can apply simple numbers and/or rules. What is economics but a set of assumptions? At what point do those assumptions become unsupportable? You all find ways to generalize from specific cases, and you do it in ways that are either over-simple or perfectly arcane.
You might as well be race car mechanics.

None of you value the specifics of things, the tastes and smells. A cook deals in specifics, an actor deals in specifics, a lawyer deals in specifics. A poet writes in untranslatable specifics. But for the academy everything must fit within a generalization. And when the generalization defines the thing, the thing, as a specificity, no longer exists. And what’s worse, every mediocre graduate student and cow-town professor must be able to make such generalizations. Every holder of a Ph.D must be able not only to teach important problems but to solve them!. Every assistant professor must have an original mind. And they don’t.

My mother gives perhaps the worst performance of Bach on the piano that I have ever heard. She plays the notes, unable or unwilling to take the indulgence of adding any variation, any idiosyncratic gesture that might make the playing personal. She refuses to perform as if by performing she would become merely a specific thing in time, a part of the world, unaware, un-intellectual.

If you can’t understand specifics your generalizations will be meaningless. And if you can’t play Bach as if you wrote the music yourself you’ll never understand the music he wrote.

The value of this is what Alan Sokal disputes. And what disgusts me is that nervous professors in the humanities are worried that he’s right. Why else would they indulge in pseudoscientific bullshit except in a desperate attempt to find a way to say that they too are worthy of respect.

My honest reaction to your post, Seth, is that you just hit play on some prepared speech you had. You have no idea of how scientists feel about poetry or about art, or about all of the subtleties of humanity. You can be offended by misuses of scientific terminology without being some sort of soulless automaton; you can be in a quantitative discipline without approaching every aspect of life with the green eyeshades of the accountant.

I’m an athiest, I don’t know what you mean by soul.

On the other hand I’m not a ‘Bright.”
Nor am I a member of Mensa or any other cult.

I meant “soul” in a metaphoric sense. You know, like in poetry.

Just in case anyone is reading this thread, the author of the adequacy article *is* Dsquared. Jsm (or John Saul Montoya, or streetlawyer) was a pseudonym he used while (hilariously) trolling slashdot.org and kuro5hin.org, and creating adequacy.org.

p.
I described the anecdotes upon which my assertion was based. The point was more about familiarity breeding contempt. No one escapes maths in the baccalaureate whereas in the UK you can get a degree in economics without calculus. At a guess a majority of UK philosophy students will not have any maths from beyond 16. I suggest that might make a difference.

In grad school I would pretend to be an egyptologist so that people would talk to me about my subject. People quite happily say that they barely passed their GCSEs. I know a tetralingual , multiple prize winning lawyer who still feels intellectually inferior because she wasn’t in the top stream in Maths. She’s not English. I report you decide.

In any case the person who introduced me to Kristeva was indeed a mathematician. I imagine most mathematicians ignore her, some will have read Sokal for laughs. This one was interested in Rilke and thought she had good things to say.

Though I said otherwise, the comment above is a bit flabby. But only a bit.

I’m done.

“necessarily usual to insist that zero is a finite number in situations like this”

“if you allow for finite to include zero”

I’m curious: are there people for whom the status of zero as a finite number is open to question or interpretation?

I think I’ve heard physicists say “finite” when they mean “nonzero”, as in, “a finite probability”. This seems strange and wrong to me (and has kept me up nights). Are they thinking that zero is infinitely small, and therefore, non-finite in its own way? Or what?

The Seth Edelbaum Experience writes:

I find very little difference between any of you, and your arguments, between Sokal and the idiots at Social Text. All of you are trying to find ways to turn ambiguity into something managable, something concrete, something to which you can apply simple numbers and/or rules.

and

Most scientists like to solve problems, and once they’re solved, they go to the next one. …
Their language is defined in terms of ‘advance’ and ‘progress’. …
And many in this country at least extend this logic to their view of the world at large …
Rules sing for most of you, like music.

and then

You think generalizations are the highest form of thought. They’re not.

Why so many generalizations from you then?

I am perfectly willing to agree with what you seem to be saying, that educated people, here and elsewhere, are caught in the grip of language(s) that they employ without fully understanding, like counters in a game that have more ritual significance than anything else. But you describe your project as emphasizing:

the form of intelligence that fosters a respect for judgement as opposed to mechanism.

It should be obvious that the generalizations you make about “you scientists” are expressions of ideas that you have about social mechanism. In other words, they are not expressions of judgment. Judgment would discriminate individuals and understand that each individual here has a very specific, idiosycratic relationship to their own misunderstood kaleidoscope of linguistic rituals.

So your basic ideas, if followed properly to their conclusion, would seem to undermine your current rhetorical position just as much as theirs. Shouldn’t you be turning into some kind of Buddhist? (I consider that to be a respectable option for any thinker holding your premises.)

“In math, like in ordinary language, the meaning of words can depend on the context (which is fine as long as the context is clear). In some contexts, “finite” may include zero, and in other contexts, it might not.”

More tersely, “Walt Pohl is one of those people” (for whom zero is sometimes not finite).

I’ll ask again at more length. What meanings do “finite” and “zero” have for you, such that sometimes zero is finite, and sometimes it isn’t? Beyond the present one, what contexts can you adduce where zero is not finite?

postscript to my last — yes, I know it’s an act of charity to confidently assert that what Social Text et al are doing is addressing the question of how to communicate subjective humanity.

However, as Kierkegaard said, we can never know the subjective intention of another. (Unless of course they display no facility with irony, which proves them to be incapable of understanding eternal matters.)

OK, Social Text is disqualified. Sorry. Well, take them as a sort of synechdoche for the whole project …

Call it whatever you want, it’s the only question. And people have been struggling with it for a lot longer than any contemporary theory.