Lakoff

[gusl]

Just as I was arguing to a colleague that Lakoff (who vaguely argues that mathematics is nothing more than a feature of the human mind; that the idea of a transcendent mathematics is nothing more than a myth... though he seems to avoid committing to any clear view) seems to have a relativist bias, I discovered that he has an entry on the Disinfopedia (unfortunately, it doesn't talk about his bias)

A bunch of interesting psychology headlines

Comments

[bram.livejournal.com]

Found you again while searching for LJers interested in category theory.

I bought Lakoff's Where Mathematics Comes From, skimmed it, and sold it to a used bookstore. I also read Rudy Rucker's Mind Tools at around the same time and liked it more. (It's a somewhat flaky book though.) It contains such insights as the possibility that 2 spheres of the brain were a neccessary result of evolution: one sphere for discrete thinking (language and letters) and the other for continuous (geometry).

I wonder if Lakoff responds to the inverse argument: that our body is shaped by the world we live in, and so by inherent mathematical limitations on what's possible.

[bram.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry. Of course I meant hemispheres and not spheres.