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Understanding the Infinite Reviews

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Summary: Important Contribution to Modern Epistemology
Comment: The 20th century saw more advances in knowledge than could filter down to general society. Relativity and Quantum Theory are part of the vernacular, even if the popular conceptions are not necessarily good generalizations of their counterparts in science. The corresponding advances in philosophy, however, have stayed more in the province of academia, largely because philosophy itself has become highly technical; but the physics of beyond-everyday-experience have demanded these advances, primarily in epistemology, because the fundamental questions of science today are of meaning and understanding.

Understanding the Infinite is a work of epistemology. Its contribution to the foundations of general knowledge demand that it disseminate beyond academia, although the ground Lavine breaks requires the extensive citations and technical style he employs. The author poses and addresses the following question. If set theory is so intuitively self-evident and seemingly such a fundamental underpinning of all mathematics, why is it so hard to express technically and why has the axiomatization of set theory been so controversial? Set theory was the big idea which the mid-20th century educational establishment thought important enough to indoctrinate schoolchildren with in the guise of new math. Yet set theory never took root in popular consciousness, certainly not the notion of transfiniteness.

Lavine starts out by dispelling the anecdotal account of the development of set theory, which has misled even professional mathematicians and philosophers to conclude "The fundamental axioms of mathematics...are to a large extent arbitrary and historically determined." He constructs what he claims is the correct historical development of set theory (I'll let historians of mathematics decide this) including sidetracks into Russell's failed program to equate mathematics and logic (and in the process dispels the significance of Russell's paradox), and von Neumann's axiomatization of set theory emphasizing functions. The outcome of his exposition is the Zermelo-Fraenkel axiomatization with the Axiom of Choice (ZFC), today's common form of set theory. These chapters by themselves could serve as an introduction to set theory, except that the Continuum Hypothesis is barely mentioned, since it plays no role in Lavine's program. Admittedly, he has nothing new to add.

The main event is Lavine's epistemological tour-de-force. Building upon work of Jan Mycielski he introduces the reader to the concept of finitary mathematics and constructs a finitary ZFC, showing that this theory justifies the adoption of what he calls the "Axiom of Zillions" (indefinitely large sets) in which we have access to very large sets' ordinal, but not necessarily its predecessors. The final step is to show this all "intuitively" extrapolates to ZFC.

QEF, QED.

I introduced physics in the opening paragraph of this review because I see Lavine's rigorous treatise in the epistemology of mathematics as a contribution to the grand unification of physics, mathematics, and epistemology. Lavine treads lightly in the physical realm. He writes "...modern physics makes it seem likely that the physical universe is of finite extent..." All of the dominant cosmologies put forth in the 20th century incorporated this misdirection set off by general relativity. On a large scale the universe must be curved. Ironically Lavine published in 1994, just as new astronomical observations began whispering "in three dimensions the universe is Euclidean". If that whisper becomes a shout in the 21st century, as appears likely from the mounting evidence, physics will have to address the transfinite.

The Calculus had to be put on a firm theoretical foundation so that it could be used as a tool to advance knowledge without justifying its use. We may see that Lavine's epistemology will do the same for set theory and transfinite numbers.

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