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Ian Hacking
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WHY IS THERE PHILOSOPHY

OF MATHEMATICS AT ALL?

This truly philosophical book takes us back to fundamentals − the

sheer experience of proof, and the enigmatic relation of mathematics
to nature. It asks unexpected questions, such as ‘What makes math-
ematics mathematics?’, ‘Where did proof come from and how did it
evolve?’, and ‘How did the distinction between pure and applied
mathematics come into being?’ In a wide-ranging discussion that is
both immersed in the past and unusually attuned to the competing
philosophical ideas of contemporary mathematicians, it shows that
proof and other forms of mathematical exploration continue to be
living, evolving practices − responsive to new technologies, yet embed-
ded in permanent (and astonishing) facts about human beings. It
distinguishes several distinct types of application of mathematics,
and shows how each leads to a different philosophical conundrum.
Here is a remarkable body of new philosophical thinking about proofs,
applications, and other mathematical activities.

ian hacking is a retired professor of the Collège de France, Chair

of Philosophy and History of Scientific Concepts, and retired
University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His
most recent books include The Taming of Chance (1990), Rewriting the
Soul (1995), The Social Construction of What? (1999), An Introduction
to Probability and Inductive Logic (2001), Mad Travelers (2002), and
The Emergence of Probability (2006).

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Ian Hacking
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W H Y IS T H E R E
PHILOSOPHY OF
M A T H E M A T I C S AT AL L ?

IAN HACKING

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Ian Hacking
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University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom

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It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

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© Ian Hacking, 2014
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2014
3 rd printing2014 2015
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan B ooks, Inc.
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isbn 978-1-107-65815-8 Paperback
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In memory of the first reader of this book, 1960

Paul Whittle 1938–2009

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For mathematics is after all an anthropological phenomenon.

Wittgenstein (1978: 399)

Mathematical activity is human activity . . . But mathematical activity

produces mathematics. Mathematics, this product of human activity,
‘alienates itself’ from the human activity which has been producing it.
It becomes a living, growing organism.
(Lakatos 1976: 146)

The birth of mathematics can also be regarded as the discovery of a

capacity of the human mind, or of human thought – hence its
tremendous importance for philosophy: it is surely significant that,
in the semilegendary intellectual tradition of the Greeks, Thales is
named both as the earliest of the philosophers and the first prover of
geometric theorems.
(Stein 1988: 238)

A square can be dissected into finitely many unequal squares, but a

cube cannot be dissected into finitely many unequal cubes. Proof of the
latter:
In a square dissection the smallest square is not at an edge (for obvious
reasons). Suppose now a cube dissection does exist. The cubes stand-
ing on the bottom face induce a square dissection at that face, and the
smallest of the cubes on that face stands on an internal square. The top
face of this cube is enclosed by walls; cubes must stand on this top face;
take the smallest – the process continues indefinitely.
(Littlewood 1953: 8)

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Contents

Foreword page xiii

1 A cartesian introduction 1
1 Proofs, applications, and other mathematical activities 1
2 On jargon 2
3 Descartes 3
A Application 4
4 Arithmetic applied to geometry 4
5 Descartes’ Geometry 5
6 An astonishing identity 6
7 Unreasonable effectiveness 6
8 The application of geometry to arithmetic 8
9 The application of mathematics to mathematics 9
10 The same stuff? 11
11 Over-determined? 12
12 Unity behind diversity 13
13 On mentioning honours − the Fields Medals 15
14 Analogy – and André Weil 1940 16
15 The Langlands programme 18
16 Application, analogy, correspondence 20
B Proof 21
17 Two visions of proof 21
18 A convention 21
19 Eternal truths 22
20 Mere eternity as against necessity 23
21 Leibnizian proof 23
22 Voevodsky’s extreme 25
23 Cartesian proof 26
24 Descartes and Wittgenstein on proof 26
25 The experience of cartesian proof: caveat emptor 28

vii

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viii Contents
26 Grothendieck’s cartesian vision: making it all obvious 29
27 Proofs and refutations 30
28 On squaring squares and not cubing cubes 32
29 From dissecting squares to electrical networks 34
30 Intuition 35
31 Descartes against foundations? 37
32 The two ideals of proof 38
33 Computer programmes: who checks whom? 40
2 What makes mathematics mathematics? 41
1 We take it for granted 41
2 Arsenic 42
3 Some dictionaries 43
4 What the dictionaries suggest 45
5 A Japanese conversation 47
6 A sullen anti-mathematical protest 48
7 A miscellany 48
8 An institutional answer 51
9 A neuro-historical answer 52
10 The Peirces, father and son 53
11 A programmatic answer: logicism 54
12 A second programmatic answer: Bourbaki 55
13 Only Wittgenstein seems to have been troubled 57
14 Aside on method – on using Wittgenstein 59
15 A semantic answer 60
16 More miscellany 61
17 Proof 62
18 Experimental mathematics 63
19 Thurston’s answer to the question ‘what makes?’ 66
20 On advance 67
21 Hilbert and the Millennium 68
22 Symmetry 71
23 The Butterfly Model 72
24 Could ‘mathematics’ be a ‘fluke of history’? 73
25 The Latin Model 74
26 Inevitable or contingent? 75
27 Play 76
28 Mathematical games, ludic proof 77
3 Why is there philosophy of mathematics? 79
1 A perennial topic 79
2 What is the philosophy of mathematics anyway? 80

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Contents ix
3 Kant: in or out? 81
4 Ancient and Enlightenment 83
A An answer from the ancients: proof and exploration 83
5 The perennial philosophical obsession . . . 83
6 The perennial philosophical obsession . . . is totally anomalous 85
7 Food for thought (Matière à penser) 86
8 The Monster 87
9 Exhaustive classification 88
10 Moonshine 89
11 The longest proof by hand 89
12 The experience of out-thereness 90
13 Parables 91
14 Glitter 91
15 The neurobiological retort 92
16 My own attitude 93
17 Naturalism 94
18 Plato! 96
B An answer from the Enlightenment: application 97
19 Kant shouts 97
20 The jargon 98
21 Necessity 99
22 Russell trashes necessity 100
23 Necessity no longer in the portfolio 102
24 Aside on Wittgenstein 103
25 Kant’s question 104
26 Russell’s version 105
27 Russell dissolves the mystery 106
28 Frege: number a second-order concept 107
29 Kant’s conundrum becomes a twentieth-century dilemma: (a) Vienna 108
30 Kant’s conundrum becomes a twentieth-century dilemma: (b) Quine 109
31 Ayer, Quine, and Kant 110
32 Logicizing philosophy of mathematics 111
33 A nifty one-sentence summary (Putnam redux) 112
34 John Stuart Mill on the need for a sound philosophy of mathematics 113
4 Proofs 115
1 The contingency of the philosophy of mathematics 115
A Little contingencies 116
2 On inevitability and ‘success’ 116
3 Latin Model: infinity 117
4 Butterfly Model: complex numbers 119
5 Changing the setting 121

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x Contents
B Proof 122
6 The discovery of proof 122
7 Kant’s tale 123
8 The other legend: Pythagoras 126
9 Unlocking the secrets of the universe 127
10 Plato, theoretical physicist 129
11 Harmonics works 130
12 Why there was uptake of demonstrative proof 131
13 Plato, kidnapper 132
14 Another suspect? Eleatic philosophy 133
15 Logic (and rhetoric) 135
16 Geometry and logic: esoteric and exoteric 136
17 Civilization without proof 137
18 Class bias 138
19 Did the ideal of proof impede the growth of knowledge? 139
20 What gold standard? 140
21 Proof demoted 141
22 A style of scientific reasoning 142
5 Applications 144
1 Past and present 144
A The emergence of a distinction 144
2 Plato on the difference between philosophical and practical
mathematics 144
3 Pure and mixed 146
4 Newton 148
5 Probability – swinging from branch to branch 149
6 Rein and angewandt 150
7 Pure Kant 151
8 Pure Gauss 152
9 The German nineteenth century, told in aphorisms 153
10 Applied polytechniciens 153
11 Military history 156
12 William Rowan Hamilton 158
13 Cambridge pure mathematics 160
14 Hardy, Russell, and Whitehead 161
15 Wittgenstein and von Mises 162
16 SIAM 163
B A very wobbly distinction 164
17 Kinds of application 164
18 Robust but not sharp 168

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Contents xi
19 Philosophy and the Apps 169
20 Symmetry 171
21 The representational−deductive picture 172
22 Articulation 174
23 Moving from domain to domain 174
24 Rigidity 176
25 Maxwell and Buckminster Fuller 176
26 The maths of rigidity 179
27 Aerodynamics 181
28 Rivalry 182
29 The British institutional setting 184
30 The German institutional setting 186
31 Mechanics 187
32 Geometry, ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ 188
33 A general moral 188
34 Another style of scientific reasoning 189
6 In Plato’s name 191
1 Hauntology 191
2 Platonism 191
3 Webster’s 193
4 Born that way 193
5 Sources 194
6 Semantic ascent 195
7 Organization 196
A Alain Connes, Platonist 197
8 Off-duty and off-the-cuff 197
9 Connes’ archaic mathematical reality 198
10 Aside on incompleteness and platonism 201
11 Two attitudes, structuralist and Platonist 202
12 What numbers could not be 203
13 Pythagorean Connes 205
B Timothy Gowers, anti-Platonist 206
14 A very public mathematician 206
15 Does mathematics need a philosophy? No 207
16 On becoming an anti-Platonist 208
17 Does mathematics need a philosophy? Yes 209
18 Ontological commitment 211
19 Truth 212
20 Observable and abstract numbers 213
21 Gowers versus Connes 215

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xii Contents
22 The ‘standard’ semantical account 216
23 The famous maxim 218
24 Chomsky’s doubts 220
25 On referring 221
7 Counter-platonisms 223
1 Two more platonisms – and their opponents 223
A Totalizing platonism as opposed to intuitionism 224
2 Paul Bernays (1888–1977) 224
3 The setting 225
4 Totalities 227
5 Other totalities 228
6 Arithmetical and geometrical totalities 230
7 Then and now: different philosophical concerns 231
8 Two more mathematicians, Kronecker and Dedekind 232
9 Some things Dedekind said 233
10 What was Kronecker protesting? 235
11 The structuralisms of mathematicians and philosophers distinguished 236
B Today’s platonism/nominalism 238
12 Disclaimer 238
13 A brief history of nominalism now 238
14 The nominalist programme 239
15 Why deny? 241
16 Russellian roots 242
17 Ontological commitment 244
18 Commitment 245
19 The indispensability argument 246
20 Presupposition 248
21 Contemporary platonism in mathematics 250
22 Intuition 252
23 What’s the point of platonism? 253
24 Peirce: The only kind of thinking that has ever advanced human culture 254
25 Where do I stand on today’s platonism/nominalism? 256
26 The last word 256

Disclosures 258
References 262
Index 281

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Foreword

This is a book of philosophical thoughts about proofs, applications, and

other mathematical activities.
Philosophers tend to emphasize mathematical ‘knowledge’, but as
G. H. Hardy said on the first page of his Apology (1940), ‘the function of a
mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to
mathematics’. I have emphasized the ‘do’. Hardy was writing not only an
Apologia pro vita sua, but also a mathematician’s Lament that he was now
too old to create much more mathematics. He also, notoriously, wanted to
keep mathematics pure, whereas I believe that the uses, ‘the applications’,
are as important as the theorems proved. Neither proof nor application is,
however, as clear and distinct an idea as might be hoped.
To reflect on the doing of mathematics, on mathematics as activity, is not
to practise the sociology of mathematics. Happily that is now a burgeoning
field, from which one can learn much, but what follows is philosophizing,
moved by old-fashioned questions – to which I add my title question, why
do these questions arise perennially, from Plato to the present day?
This book began as the René Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in
the Netherlands, in early October, 2010. (I started writing out the talks on
the summer solstice of that year.) The format was three lectures, each
followed by comments from two different scholars. The original intention
was that the lectures and comments would be published immediately.
I began to realize at the end of the week the extent to which the material
needed to mature. The commentators generously agreed to keep their
comments. So my first duty is to thank them deeply for their hard work.
Hard work? Typically they received, late in the day, some 20,000 words per
lecture, of which only 7,000 would be spoken, and they did not even know
which ones.

For the first talk, ‘Why Is There Philosophy of Mathematics?’: Mary Leng
and Hannes Leitgeb.

xiii

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xiv Foreword
For the second talk, ‘Meaning and Necessity – and Proof’: James Conant and
Martin Kusch.
For the third talk, ‘Roots of Mathematical Reasoning’: Marcus Giaquinto
and Pierre Jacob.

Thank you all.

I originally proposed ‘Proof’ as the series title. That was the title of a thesis,
which, together with some work in modal logic, was awarded a PhD
by Cambridge University in 1962. It was dominated by my reading of
Wittgenstein’s recently published Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics,
although much influenced by what was to become Imre Lakatos’ Proofs and
Refutations, which was being completed in Cambridge as a doctoral dissertation
when I began mine.
I have published very little about the philosophy of mathematics, but it
has always been at the back of my mind, so the Descartes Lectures were a
chance to finish the job. The title ‘Proof’ would give no idea of what the
talks would be about, so Stephan Hartmann, the organizer of the events (to
whom many thanks), and I hit on ‘Proof, Calculation, Intuition, and A
Priori Knowledge’.
Very soon after the Descartes Lectures, in late October 2010, I gave three
similar talks at the University of California, Berkeley, beginning with the
Howison Lecture, ‘Proof, Truth, Hands and Mind’. Here is how I
explained the title, after indulgently admiring my choice of words of one
syllable:
Why this title? First, because proof has been an essential part of Western
mathematics ever since Plato. And Plato thought that mathematics was the
sure guide to truth. I want also to think of how we do mathematics, in a
material way that Plato would hardly have acknowledged. We think with our
hands, our whole bodies. We communicate with one another not only by
talking and writing but also by gesticulating. If I am thinking mathematically
I may draw a diagram to take you through a series of thoughts, and in this
way pass my thoughts in my mind over to yours.

After California I put this material aside while teaching on other topics at the
University of Cape Town, and intensely experiencing all too little of that
amazing land and its peoples. In January 2011 I did attend the annual meetings
of the Philosophical Society of Southern Africa, and the corresponding
Society for the Philosophy of Science, near Durban. There I presented,
respectively, abridged forms of the first two Descartes/Howison Lectures
(Hacking, 2011a, 2011b). I may mention also a contribution to a conference
in Israel in honour of Mark Steiner, in December 2011, which began with

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Foreword xv
Pythagoras and ended with P. A. M. Dirac (Hacking, 2012b). Then in
November 2012 I did part of the third Descartes Lecture as the Henry
Myers Lecture for the Royal Anthropological Institute, London.
In March and April of 2012 I gave six Gaos Lectures at the National
Autonomous University of Mexico, at the invitation of Carlos Lópes
Beltrán and Sergio Martinez, to whom again many thanks. The title was
The Mathematical Animal, but in fact the first five lectures covered only the
first Descartes Lecture. And so it has come to pass that this book is not the
entire set of lectures given in Tilburg, but only the first.
The connection between the present book and my dissertation of 1962
will not be obvious, but plus ça change. My title here is, Why Is There
Philosophy of Mathematics At All? I was astonished, in preparing the present
book for the press, to reread the brief preface to my dissertation of 1962: ‘We
must return to simple instances to see what is surprising, to discover, in fact,
why there are philosophies of mathematics at all.’ And I may mention that
my choice of topics comes from the first edition of Wittgenstein’s Remarks
on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956). The two significant nouns most
often used in that edition (to which I prepared my own index) are Beweis
and Anwendung, ‘proof’ and ‘application’.
I thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada
for awarding me its annual Gold Medal for Research. The cash coming with
the medal is rightly dedicated to further research, and much of it was used in
preparing this book. I thank James Davies in Toronto and Kaave Lajevardi
in Teheran for a lot of help in the home stretch. The final threads were tied
up in March 2013 during a blissful time at the Stellenbosch Institute for
Advanced Study.

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