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Arielle Saiber
Henry S. Turner
A Brief Introduction
Arielle Saiber
Bowdoin College
Henry S. Turner
Rutgers University
“[I]f mathematics is the study of purely imaginary states of things, poets must be
great mathematicians.”
—Charles Sanders Peirce1
1
2 Configurations
Barry Mazur has demonstrated.4 “Of all escapes from reality,” wrote
mathematician Giancarlo Rota, “mathematics is the most successful
ever.”5
Not that literature is about escaping from reality, of course. It and
all the visual and performing arts, as well as every discipline in the
humanities and sciences for that matter, often share with mathe-
matics a common goal: that of describing and/or addressing the “re-
ally real.” Questions of reality, truth, and certainty are at the core of
the philosophy of mathematics: Does mathematics afford us entry
into reality and truth? Does it provide us with certainty? Contrary
to Platonist beliefs about the ability of mathematics to give us these
things is the stance that mathematics is actually about multiple re-
alities, relative truths, complexities, and ambiguities. In essence, do-
ing pure mathematics (not merely doing computations) is an exer-
cise in imagination—and imagination, an exercise in abstraction.
One need only recall a few key moments in the history of math-
ematics—the discovery of irrational numbers by the ancient Greeks;
the development of non-Euclidean geometry; Kurt Gödel’s findings
concerning undecidable propositions and the “incompleteness of
mathematics”; chaos theory—as well as the debates and controver-
sies surrounding these topics, to see how closely mathematics dances
with uncertainties. Perhaps what mathematics shows us is that the
“really real” is, in fact, a whirl of ambiguity, and that, as mathemati-
cian William Byers has written, mathematics requires thinking in
terms of contradiction and paradox.6 Or perhaps, as Edwin Hutchins
and others have argued, we exteriorize thinking through our physi-
cal environment, through marks, instruments, and the physical con-
figurations of objects in our built environment.7 A related claim, but
one that is vigorously contested, is the notion that George Lakoff
and Rafael Núñez have proposed: that mathematics exists only be-
cause the human brain does—it is a product of it, just as metaphors
and anything we make are.8 And so, the age-old question remains:
4. Barry Mazur, Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen) (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003).
5. Giancarlo Rota, in N. G. Cooper, From Cardinals to Chaos (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), p. 26.
6. William Byers, How Mathematicians Think: Using Ambiguity, Contradiction, and Paradox
to Create Mathematics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
7. Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
8. George Lakoff and Rafael Núñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied
Mind Brings Mathematics into Being (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
Saiber / Mathematics and the Imagination 3
this position was (and is) the “intuitionist” position, which seeks
to establish mathematics as a system of mental constructs that arise
from what a finite human can conceive of and prove without the
use of indirect demonstrations derived from contradiction (i.e.,
Brouwer). And apart from adherents to the three major schools in
the philosophy of mathematics (logicism, formalism, and intuition-
ism) are those who continue to tend toward the Platonic model, in
which mathematical objects exist independently of our minds. Dur-
ing this last century of great mathematical advances and discussion
on the nature of mathematics as a project, mathematicians Henri
Poincaré, Edward Kasner and James Newman, David Hilbert, Her-
mann Weyl, Jacques Hadamard, and François Le Lionnais, among
others, penned important biographical studies, as well as treatises,
on the doing of mathematics—that is, the processes of imagining,
inventing/discovering, calculating, verifying, and so on.9
The philosophy of mathematics, like mathematics itself, contin-
ues to flourish.10 During the last half-century, W. V. O. Quine and
Hilary Putnam have proposed a notion of “mathematical empiri-
cism,” or “naturalism” (building, to some degree, on that of J. S. Mill
and on intuitionism), in which the ontology of mathematical enti-
ties and mathematical truth is based in human experience and re-
veals itself to be indispensible to scientific theory. Studies by Brian
Rotman, Sha Xin Wei, and Andrew Pickering have examined the
gestural, performative, and technical (and technological-related) as-
pects involved in doing mathematics: actions such as creating no-
tations, methods, proofs, diagrams, and digital simulations.11 The
9. Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, trans. George Bruce Halsted (New York: Sci-
ence Press, 1905); Edward Kasner and James Newman, Mathematics and the Imagination
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1940); David Hilbert and S. Cohn Vóssen, Geometry and the
Imagination, trans. P. Nemenyi (1932; reprint, New York: Chelsea Publishing, 1952); Her-
mann Weyl, The Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1945); Jacques Hadamard, An Essay on the Psychology of Invention
in the Mathematical Field (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1945); François Le
Lionnais, ed., Great Currents of Mathematical Thought: Mathematics in the Arts and Sci-
ences, 2 vols., trans. H. Kline and C. Pinter (1948; reprint, New York: Dover, 1971).
10. See, for example, Paul Benacerraf and Hilary Putnam, eds., Philosophy of Mathemat-
ics: Selected Readings (Englewood, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964); Stephan Körner, The Philoso-
phy of Mathematics (1968; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1986); Morris Kline,
Mathematical Thought from Ancient to Modern Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972); Thomas Tymoczko, ed., New Directions in the Philosophy of Mathematics (Bos-
ton: Birkhäuser, 1986); Stewart Shapiro, Thinking about Mathematics: The Philosophy of
Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
11. Brian Rotman, Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in the Turing Machine: Taking God Out of
Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In—An Essay in Corporeal Semiotics (Stanford, CA:
Saiber / Mathematics and the Imagination 5
Stanford University Press, 1993), and Mathematics as Sign: Writing, Imagining, Counting
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice:
Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Sha Xin Wei, “Dif-
ferential Geometrical Performance and Poiesis,” Configurations 12:1 (2004): 133–160.
12. Imre Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations: The Logic of Mathematical Discovery, ed. John
Worrall and Elie Zahar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Reuben Hersh,
What Is Mathematics, Really? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
13. See especially Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Con-
tinuum, 2006), Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge, MA: Polity
Press, 2008), Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano (Lon-
don: Continuum Press, 2004).
14. Aristotle, De Anima, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, 2 vols., ed. Jonathan Barnes
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 1:682 (429a4).
6 Configurations
15. On the imagination in classical and medieval thought, see W. D. Ross, Aristotle
(London: Methuen, 1949), esp. pp. 142–146, 148; Michael V. Wedin, Mind and Imagina-
tion in Aristotle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988); David Summers, The
Judgment of Sense (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); E. Ruth Harvey, The
Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Warburg Insti-
tute Surveys 6 (London: Warburg Institute, 1975); Dennis L. Sepper, Descartes’s Imagina-
tion: Proportion, Images, and the Activity of Thinking (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1996); and the comprehensive study by Eva Brann, The World of the Imagination:
Sum and Substance (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).
16. Aristotle, De Anima (above, n. 14), p. 1:680 (427b14–28).
17. Cited by Brann, World of the Imagination (above, n. 15), p. 594.
Saiber / Mathematics and the Imagination 7
18. Ibid.
19. See “Rules for the Direction of the Mind,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,
2 vols., trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothooff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), rule 14, esp. 1:58–62, and rule 12, esp. 1:42–43;
discussed by Brann, World of the Imagination (above, n. 15), pp. 75–77; Sepper, Des-
cartes’s Imagination (above, n. 15); Jacob Klein, Greek Mathematical Thought and the Ori-
gin of Algebra, trans. Eva Brann (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 197–211.
20. Aristotle, De Anima (above, n. 14), p. 1:681 (428b10–429a2).
21. Gottlob Frege, “The Concept of Number,” in Benacerraf and Putnam, Philosophy of
Mathematics (above, n. 10), p. 132. Bertrand Russell would call it a “plurality”: “Number
is what is characteristic of numbers, as man is what is characteristic of men. A plurality
is not an instance of number, but of some particular number. A trio of men, for ex-
ample, is an instance of the number 3, and the number 3 is an instance of number; but
the trio is not an instance of number.” See Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philoso-
phy, 2nd ed. (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1920), p. 11.
8 Configurations
22. See the discussion of arithmos and logistic in classical Greek mathematics by Klein,
Greek Mathematical Thought (above, n. 19), pp. 10–25, 46–60: “Only that can be
‘counted’ which is not one, which is before us in a certain number: neither an object of
sense nor one ‘pure’ unit is a number of things or units” (49); see also Klein’s discussion
of the problem in Descartes (ibid., pp. 199–202).
23. This is the approach that Eva Brann takes, arguing that intuition provides the
“mental place or medium which the imagination activates and in which it inscribes its
figures”; see Brann, World of the Imagination (above, n. 15), pp. 584–587. Barry Mazur
also describes a version when he distinguishes two acts of imagination: “the generation
of a single visual image in our minds as we read lines of verse,” and “the cultivation of
a comprehensive inner intuition for imaginary numbers, the fruit of collective imagina-
tive labors over time”; see Mazur, Imagining Numbers (above, n. 4), p. 157. On Kant, see
Brann, pp. 585, 594–595, and Bernard Freydberg, Imagination in Kant’s Critique of Practi-
cal Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
24. For the intuitionist, statements that presume the existence of a mathematical ob-
ject are illegitimate, because they introduce a metaphysical, rather than a strictly math-
ematical (i.e., calculable) concept. Mathematical objects can only be calculated accord-
ing to rules defined by mathematicians; questions and beliefs about the putative
existence of these objects must simply be set aside. See Arend Heyting, in Benacerraf
and Putnam, Philosophy of Mathematics (above, n. 10), p. 53, and “Disputation,” pp. 67,
70: “A mathematical construction ought to be so immediate to the mind and its result
so clear that it needs no foundation whatsoever.”
Saiber / Mathematics and the Imagination 9
when he wrote the play.32 In this sense, Russell effects a kind of “set-
tlement” (in Latour’s terms) between science and literature by assert-
ing a distinction between them, and then fortifying that distinction,
as necessary, with disdain and dismissiveness.33
Admitting the question of mathematical reality into direct in-
quiry, however, in turn raises intriguing questions about the nature
of the imagination. If one accepts that the imagination is neces-
sary to mathematical thought, one is led to the paradoxical state-
ment that mathematical entities are both real and imaginary, or real
because imaginary, or real insofar as the imagination allows us to
think of them as real—which is why the concept of fiction is so
useful, and we might borrow a term of classification from literary
study and call such mathematical entities realist. Rudolf Carnap has
sought to clarify the question of mathematical realism by distin-
guishing claims that pertain within a given system of explanation
(“internal” claims), from claims made about facts outside the sys-
tem (“external” claims).34 In Carnap’s view, asking whether math-
ematical objects such as numbers “really exist” confuses an external
problem with an internal one, since it would be trivial to pose the
question of reality to any mathematical system of explanation that
presumes that reality (prompting the answer, “Of course they are!”).
Serious questions about the reality of numbers could only belong to
a different domain—philosophical speculation, say, or certain kinds
of reflection prompted by naïve experience, or musings by literary
critics or other nonmathematicians—that is conducted according to
different systems of explanation. Thus the pressing question—“But
are numbers real?”—should be understood, in Carnap’s view, as a
disingenuous version of the more proper question: “Should I accept
this system of explanation about the realness of numbers as useful
or relevant to me or not”? It is not a theoretical or metaphysical
question that presents itself, but a practical one—namely, a question
of whether or not one system of explanation is to be preferred over
another in a given circumstance or for a given problem.