Subject: categories: RE: WHY ARE WE CONCERNED? I

From: "Marta Bunge" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Mar 2006 14:28:54 -0500

Dear Bill,

Congratulations on your posting, particularly in what refers to Mac Lane,
which is very revealing.

>	When Saunders Mac Lane penned his hard-hitting 1997 Synthese
>article, he was defending mathematics from an attack many of us hoped
>would just go away. But Saunders was aware of the seriousness of the
>threat, which indeed is still here with greater determination.
>Although the title of that article was "Despite physicists, proof is
>essential in mathematics", he was not opposing physics, nor even that
>immediate handful who, assuming the mantle of "mathematical physicists",
>gave themselves license to insult generations of scrupulously serious
>physicists and to demand that mathematics adopt a culture that considers
>conjecture as nearly-established truth. In essence it was an attack on
>science itself, as the highest form of knowing, that Saunders was
>opposing.

In case there may be somebody not acquainted with MacLane's excellent
article, here is a link to it:

http://www.math.nsc.ru/LBRT/g2/english/ssk/proof_is_necessary.pdf

>	The contempt for Mac Lane's fight, recently expressed in articles
>supposedly memorializing him, takes the form of the claim that category
>theory itself is a "cool" instrument for deepening obscurantism. Not only
>Harvard's "When is one thing equal to another thing?" and the Cambridge
>"morality" muddle, but also a 2003 article aimed at teachers of
>undergraduates, quite explicitly support that claim.

I suppose that you cannot (or do not want to) be more explicit.  I do not
know (for the most part) which articles you are referring to.

Best wishes,
Marta

************************************************
Marta Bunge
Professor Emerita
Dept of Mathematics and Statistics
McGill University
805 Sherbrooke St. West
Montreal, QC, Canada H3A 2K6
Office: (514) 398-3810
Home: (514) 935-3618
[email-masked]
http://www.math.mcgill.ca/bunge/
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