Erudite Relics of Loc Huu Ho

Definitions

• rationalism: platonism; branch of philosophy which emphasizes reason or intellect, rather than observation or sensory perception, as the basis for knowledge and truth.
• secular: of or relating to the doctrine that rejects religion and religious considerations

Notes

• The problems that occupied mathematicians for centuries, culminating more than 2,000 years later with the result that there are no solutions-the tasks to obtain exact solutions are impossible.
• Thomas Kuhn’s influential Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) speaks of revolutions and ‘paradigm shifts’ that make it difficult to understand scientific works of the past. I.e., to understand previous work we have to unlearn our current science and try to immerse ourselves in the overturned world-view.
• However, there’s an exception of this when mathematics is concerned. A contemporary mathematicians does not have to do much (if any) conceptual retooling in order to read and admire Euclid’s Elements.
• Plato stands at the head of a long tradition in philosophy sometimes called rationalism or ‘Platonism’

Definitions

• empiricism: the doctrine that says sense experience is the only source of knowledge
• epistemological: the science which deals with the origin, method and validity of knowledge
• experimental inference: a.k.a. induction by simple enumeration is the process of esitmating what can truly be ascribed to a whole class of things or events on the basis of what has been observed to be true of part of that class
• instrumentalism: the doctrine that ideas are instruments of response and adaptation, and that their truth is to be judged in terms of their effectiveness
• operationalism: the process of defining a concept as the operations that will measure the concept (variables) through specific observations
• posteriori: inductive; relating to or derived by reasoning from observed facts
• priori: deductive; relating to or derived by reasoning from self-evident propositions
• solipsism: the belief that the only thing a person can be absolutely sure of is that he or she exists. All other persons or objects do not exist independently and are merely projections of one