[FRIAM] Can empirical discoveries be mathematical?

[Frank Wimberly]

What Barry said.

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Frank C. Wimberly
140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
Santa Fe, NM 87505

505 670-9918
Santa Fe, NM

On Mon, Sep 6, 2021, 9:19 AM Barry MacKichan <barry.mackichan at mackichan.com>
wrote:

> Briefly, and in my opinion, mathematics can only make claims like ‘if A is
> true then B is true’. To say B is true, you must also say A is true.
> Eventually you have to go back to the beginning of the deductive chain, and
> the truth of the initial statement is inductive, not deductive or
> mathematics. You can predict the time and place of an eclipse, and this
> prediction is based on mathematics and a mathematical model of reality —
> Newton’s laws in this case. But the truth of this prediction is inductive
> since the initial positions and velocities for the calculation are
> inductive, as is the applicability of Newton’s laws to reality, and even
> the ‘fact’ that mathematics can describe the universe is inductive.
>
> And Einstein showed that the applicability of Newton’s laws was in fact
> wrong and offered a new model — which we inductively accept as true, if
> only provisionally.
>
> Mathematics cannot prove any statement about the real world. Any such
> statement will depend at some point on an inductive truth or a definition.
>
> —Barry
>
> On 3 Sep 2021, at 18:10, thompnickson2 at gmail.com wrote:
>
> Ok, is mathematics (logic, etc.) a way of arriving at true propositions
> distinct from observation or are mathematical truths different from
> empirical truths?
>
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