Poincare’s arguments for his thesis of the conventionality of metric depend on a relationalist program for dynamics, not on any general philosophical interpretation of science. I will sketch Poincare’s development of the relationalist program and show that his arguments for the conventionality of metric do not depend on any global strategies such as a general empiricism or Duhemian underdetermination arguments. Poincare’s theory of space, while empirically false, is more philosophically sophisticated than his critics have claimed.

Poincaré was a persistent critic of logicism. Unlike most critics of logicism, however, he did not focus his attention on the basic laws of the logicists or the question of their genuinely logical status. Instead, he directed his remarks against the place accorded to logical inference in the logicist's conception of mathematical proof. Following Leibniz, traditional logicist dogma (and this is explicit in Frege) has held that reasoning or inference is everywhere the same — that there are no principles of (...) inference specific to a given local topic. Poincaré, a Kantian, disagreed with this. Indeed, he believed that the use of non-logical reasoning was essential to genuinely mathematical reasoning (proof). In this essay, I try to isolate and clarify this idea and to describe the mathematical epistemology which underlies it. Central to this epistemology (which is basically Kantian in orientation, and closely similar to that advocated by Brouwer) is a principle of epistemic conservation which says that knowledge of a given type cannot be extended by means of an inference unless that inference itself constitutes knowledge belonging to the given type. (shrink)

often insisted existence in mathematics means logical consistency, and formal logic is the sole guarantor of rigor. The paper joins this to his view of intuition and his own mathematics. It looks at predicativity and the infinite, Poincaré's early endorsement of the axiom of choice, and Cantor's set theory versus Zermelo's axioms. Poincaré discussed constructivism sympathetically only once, a few months before his death, and conspicuously avoided committing himself. We end with Poincaré on Couturat, Russell, and Hilbert.

Poincaré's claim that Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries are translatable has generally been thought to be based on his introduction of a model to prove the consistency of Lobachevskian geometry and to be equivalent to a claim that Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries are logically isomorphic axiomatic systems. In contrast to the standard view, I argue that Poincaré's translation thesis has a mathematical, rather than a meta-mathematical basis. The mathematical basis of Poincaré's translation thesis is that the underlying manifolds of Euclidean and (...) Lobachevskian geometries are homeomorphic. Assuming as Poincaré does that metric relations are not factual, it follows that we can rewrite a physical theory using Euclidean geometry as one using Lobachevskian geometry and express the same facts. (shrink)

The statements traditionally labelled “necessary,” among them the valid theorems of mathematics and logic, are identified as “those whose truth is independent of experience.” The “truth” of a necessary statement has to be independent of the truth or falsity of experiential statements; a necessary statement can be neither confirmed nor refuted by empirical tests.The admission of genuinely necessary statements presents the empiricist with a troublesome problem. For an empiricist may be defined, in terms of the current idiom, as one who (...) adheres to some version, however “weak,” of a principle of verifiability. One, that is, who claims that no statement can have cognitive meaning unless its truth depends, however indirectly, upon the truth of experiential statements; unless it can be provisionally confirrned or refuted by empirical tests. Allowing that some necessary statements have cognitive meaning, then, would be to provide a prima facie case against the validity of the principle of verifiability. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the version of predicative analysis put forward by Hermann Weyl in "Das Kontinuum". I try to establish how much of the underlying motivation for Weyl's position may be due to his acceptance of a phenomenological philosophical perspective. More specifically, I analyze Weyl's philosophical ideas in connexion with the work of Husserl, in particular "Logische Untersuchungen" and "Ideen I". I believe that this interpretation of Weyl can clarify the views on mathematical existence and mathematical intuition which (...) are implicit in "Das Kontinuum". (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the version of predicative analysis put forward by Hermann Weyl in Das Kontinuum. I try to establish how much of the underlying motivation for Weyl's position may be due to his acceptance of a phenomenological philosophical perspective. More specifically, I analyze Weyl's philosophical ideas in connexion with the work of Husserl, in particular Logische Untersuchungen} and Ideen.I believe that this interpretation of Weyl can clarify the views on mathematical existence and mathematical intuition which are implicit (...) in Das Kontinuum. (shrink)