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Courtesy of YouTube, Eye’s Closed News reveals this historical footnote. (You know Apple Inc was sued by Apple Corp, right?)

Via Micro Persuasion.

From Human Action by Ludwig von Mises:

History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies. The data of history would be nothing but a clumsy accumulation of disconnected occurrences, a heap of confusion, if they could not be clarified, arranged, and interpreted by systematic praxeological knowledge.

Several months ago, David Skarbek mentioned something called Bertrand’s Paradox. Admittedly I am not a mathematician nor am I a historian versed in that field of study, so I’ve been having to learn at the mercy of the internets. I do however, know of Mr. Bertrand Russell as a philosopher (an empiricist) due to his clashes with the Austrian methodology of apriorism.

Interestingly enough, I recently came across a biography on Henri Poincare, a French mathematician. This note tickled my fancy:

Poincaré had the opposite philosophical views of Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege, who believed that mathematics were a branch of logic. Poincaré strongly disagreed, claiming that intuition was the life of mathematics. Poincaré gives an interesting point of view in his book Science and Hypothesis:

For a superficial observer, scientific truth is beyond the possibility of doubt; the logic of science is infallible, and if the scientists are sometimes mistaken, this is only from their mistaking its rule.

Poincaré believed that arithmetic is a synthetic science. He argued that Peano’s axioms cannot be proven non-circularly with the principle of induction (Murzi, 1998), therefore concluding that arithmetic is a priori synthetic and not analytic. Poincaré then went on to say that mathematics cannot be deduced from logic since it is not analytic. His views were the same as those of Kant (Kolak, 2001). However Poincaré did not share Kantian views in all branches of philosophy and mathematics. For example, in geometry, Poincaré believed that the structure of non-Euclidean space can be known analytically.

Perhaps I will now attempt to gain a third masters degree, or simpy pay heed to Mises’s words.