Robert Paul writes,
Donal wrote
Intriguing thread title. Swallowed bait. The post asks: |
The answer is yes. Engaging in maths and logical work, as Tarski did, does not lead to the murder of millions or promote an inhuman fascistic social philosophy.
It is also questionable how "_sincere_" is used here: it is usually taken as a term of approbation - but perhaps not when referring to a sometime Nazi supporter:-give me insincerity any day. That Tarski doubted the reality of mathematical objects, in whatever philosophical sense, would not make his work insincere either - no more than Berkeley was insincere when he looked for what he couldn't presently perceive.
To even ask whether Tarki's nominalism leaves him "culpable", on the plane on which MH is culpable, is risible. It would be less fatuous to ask whether the risks of passive smoking from Einstein's pipe put Einstein in the same bracket of "culpable" as Hitler with his "sincere" use of death squads.
Of course, if a strong argument can be made, by examining the history and impact of ideas, that Tarski's math and logic work helped produce murderous regimes and a senseless World War, then these peepers will be agog.
Lawrence replied (I’m cutting and pasting from his blog)
Donal's outrage would be valid only if something like the criticisms that Emmanuel Faye advanced were also valid and I am have assumed they are not based on my own reading of Faye, Heidegger, and others -- and the further evidence of Albert Kissler (see http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2010/05/albert-kissler-examining-fayes-smoking.html ). His outrage is valid, in other words, only if he doesn't know or understand the evidence.
[My—RP’s—comments are enclosed in square brackets like the ones that enclose this sentence.]
[Donal is not examining the evidence for or against the claim that something like the tenets of National Socialism can be found in Heidegger’s work, of whatever period. He is responding to the foolish claim that if Heidegger had somehow embraced, endorsed, or promoted them, then Tarski would be ‘culpable,’ (of what, I’m not clear) just as Heidegger would have been (in some way) ‘culpable’) had he somehow endorsed or promoted National Socialism, or at least some of its principles. This claim is so foolish that I know it can’t be what Lawrence means.]
[What does he mean? It seems to be this. The claim that Faye made about Heidegger’s sympathy with National Socialism is false. Had it been true though, he would have been guilty of something, and guilty in a way that would have, by parity of reasoning, made Tarski ‘guilty’ (of insincerity). Yet Heidegger’s guilt or innocence with respect to his having endorsed, etc., or denounced, etc., National Socialism has absolutely nothing to do with the ‘sincerity’ (or bad faith) of formalist mathematicians. A formalist in mathematics (I’m simplifying a lot) is someone who doesn’t believe in the existence of numbers as quasi-Platonic entities that lie outside the ordinary realm of experience. Simply: numerals do not refer to anything beyond themselves (and so with other mathematical ‘entities’).]
[An oversimplified analogy might be that the names of chess pieces do not refer to e.g., actual wood, ivory, or gold objects; to point out to someone that a certain chess piece is the King will only make sense if he or she knows the rules of chess: it’s the King that may be moved, checked, and so on—and in a particular game, this piece is the one that obeys these rules. Tossed into a box with the other pieces, this particular bit of stuff differs only in size and shape from them.]
[Talented chess players can play by email, or even through exchanging postcards, and if they set out actual chess pieces in front of them, these will serve—their arrangement will serve—only as a mnemonic. It would be silly to imagine someone’s saying that they were insincere—only playing at playing chess—because they weren’t moving actual wooden pieces about.]
[To say that anyone who doesn’t believe that numbers have a sort of Platonic existence can’t be doing serious mathematics, mathematical logic, ‘meta-mathematics,’ or whatever, can only be supported by rhetoric.]
[Formalism, finitism, intuitionism, and realism are all forms of mathematics. Each has its limitations and each has achieved something worthwhile. What adherence to one or the other of them though might have to Heidegger’s political beliefs is a mystery.]
[But, then, lots of things are.]
Robert Paul
LAWRENCE RESPONDS:
Donal writes, "Was Heidegger more culpable for sincerely supporting an ideology that later was responsible for heinous acts than Tarski for insincerely engaging in mathematical and logical work?" I can't read this in the way that you do
You write, Donal is not examining the evidence for or against the claim that something like the tenets of National Socialism can be found in Heidegger’s work, of whatever period. He is responding to the foolish claim that if Heidegger had somehow embraced, endorsed, or promoted them, then Tarski would be ‘culpable,’ (of what, I’m not clear) just as Heidegger would have been (in some way) ‘culpable’) had he somehow endorsed or promoted National Socialism, or at least some of its principles. This claim is so foolish that I know it can’t be what Lawrence means.]"
Thank you for the disclaimer in the last sentence. Indeed I don't mean what you suggest. And I don't think Donal is taking it in that sense either. But I didn't mean to say that Heidegger and Tarski are guilty of the same thing, nor that I was comparing their respective guilt. Donal had it right up to a point, I was considering Heidegger's guilt in regard to having supported National Socialism in 1933-34 in loose relation with Tarski's guilt at claiming to be Nomalistic about his work in Logic. I say "loose relation" because I only paired their comparative guilt because a commentator on my blog, enowning related them when he wrote, To my mind one needs to seperate Heidegger's actions with the Nazis and his culpability (or lack of prescience, if you will) from his works. Mathematicians, scientists, engineers, don't have this problem; if an equation is correct and useful, it is a good equation irrespective of the history of the person who thought it up."
My intention was not so much to compare Tarski's "guilt" to Heidegger's as it was to disagree a bit with enowning who asserted that Mathematicians were not faced with problems of culpability like philosophers were. But also, I found the "guilt" of Tarski interesting and hoped to go off on a tangent. I've spent a lot of time on Heidegger and only posted the "smoking gun" of Faye; which turned out to be smokeless, because it was an important bit of information that was missing from earlier discussions on Heidegger's guilt. As a result of enowning's comment I thought a bit more about Tarski, and while I am far from drawing more than tentative conclusions, I do wonder about him
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