Platonism, fictionalism and all that

There was recently an interesting discussion of platonism and fictionalism as philosophies of mathematics.  This was at “The Electric Agora” blog.  I added a couple of comments myself.

Yesterday, I went back to take another look.  That was mostly to see if there were any additional comments.  And there were two, both by Robin Herbert.  But comments are now closed for that post.  So I’ll say something here.

First some links:

• First comment by Robin Herbert;
• Second comment by Robin Herbert.

Both comments add to the discussion and are worth reading.

Is fictionalism true?

In his first comment, Robin says:

So the argument that fictionalism must be true because the axioms are only conventions appears to make the same mistake as saying the truth or falsity of “if A then B” depends on the truth or falsity of A.

To me, this seems weird.  I have said that I am a fictionalist.  I have never said that fictionalism is true.  I’m not at all sure that I know what it would even mean to say that fictionalism is true.

Closing comments after 30 days

I’ve changed the settings on this blog, so that comments are automatically closed on a post after 30 days.

I’m making this change for two reasons:

1. There are too many spam comments, mostly on older posts.
2. I rarely get comments on old posts anyway.

For the present, I’ll leave all comments open on my other blog (on computer), because I do sometimes get comments on older posts there.

Review of “Why I left, Why I stayed”

It’s about a month since I listened to a podcast, featuring a discussion with Bart Campolo.  I found that interesting, so I bought the book that was co-authored by Bart Campolo and his father Tony Campolo.  This post is mainly a review of the book.  However, you might want to start by listening to that podcast.

Background

Tony Campolo is well known as part of Evangelical Christianity, specifically the Evangelical left.  Bart, his son, started off in Evangelical Christianity, but reached a point in his life where he could no longer believe.  How he reached that point is discussed in the podcast and in the book.  Although he rejected Christianity, Bart continued with a humanist mission.  Tony, Bart’s father, regretted Bart’s decision but accepted it nontheless.

The book is mostly a sequence of chapters, alternately written by Tony and by Bart, with a final chapter that was jointly written.

My review

I found the book a bit uneven.  But this is to be expected when it consists of an alternation of chapters with two different authors.