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I was looking over Urs’s page for his talk On the nLab and noted in relation to the idea of renaming it –
Maybe MathPhysPhilLab or MathPhysLab (we never had substantial contribution on Phil).
There are positions in philosophy which make sense of this. Take Peter Hacker’s version of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the subject (p. 45):
(i) Philosophy has no subject matter of its own—in the manner in which the natural, social, and human sciences have a subject matter of their own.
(ii) There are no philosophical propositions—in the sense that there are propositions of physics or chemistry, economics or history.
(iii) There are no theses in philosophy.
(iv) There are no theories in philosophy—in the sense in which there are theories in the sciences of nature and of man.
(v) There is no philosophical knowledge—comparable to the knowledge achieved in the sciences. Philosophy is not part of the quest for knowledge of the world. The philosopher is not a citizen of any republic of ideas.
(vi) Philosophy is an activity of conceptual clarification the purpose of which is to resolve philosophical problems.
There’s something to this, although it does excludes the proto-scientific style of philosophy (say, Hegel foreseeing cohesive HoTT). But then this sort of thing doesn’t lend itself well to the established results of an encyclopaedia.
Just to clarify that this is an unfinished (hardly started) page in preparation for my presentation next Saturday. The page currently contains little more than the result of some late-night brain-storming. Maybe I should have started this on my private web.
So better if readers don’t look at this unless they do seriously intend to look at material that is not yet meant and ready for public consumption.
On the issue of having or not having contributions on philosophy: I have removed the comment now. This was just a random thought that struck me while musing over possible alternative names for the nLab.
No problem.
Perhaps not the place to start a meta-philosophical discussion on the way philosophy should be done, but just to show how divided the subject is, at Hacker’s university, Oxford, there is also Timothy Williamson who has a diametrically opposed view on most things, including that philosophy be seen as very alike other disciplines, a view he calls anti-exceptionalism.
Of course, if I were to collect my thoughts before speaking specifically about philosophy on the nLab, I should (and, I’d hope: would) highlight how there is much more of it sprinkled over various entries here than commonly found in mathematical texts – which is of course your influence.
Maybe to highlight that the little comment that you saw wasn’t written with you in mind: i was thinking, rather, that, while the nLab has attracted a handful, at least, of physicist contributors, it seems to not have attracted a single further philosopher contributing entries on philosophy.
Maybe this must be so, as you argue, but it still means that the subtitle which our HomePage (and also this forum page) advertizes (“on math, physics and philosophy) is de facto a little misleading.
Of course, I find it odd that the kind of philosopher who sees what they do as a kind of theory production and so who looks to understand, say, causal reasoning or uncertain reasoning or natural language processing via a formalism, chooses then to avoid category theory/type theory. But the slack is being taken up by the Applied Category Theory community.
Which however brings me to the other possibly contentious point that the notes you looked at were (and are and will be) making:
That engagement with category theory (and its triX friends) should not be required of contributions to the nLab, nor be perceived as such. I regard it as a founding flaw of the nLab that people got the impression that category theory is to be in the foreground, instead of being the backdrop.
Just as there was and is room on the nLab to bring in all kind of 0-POV physics, there would have been room here to write all kinds of 0-POV entries on philosophy, say akin to what one sees on plato.stanford.edu. This didn’t happen in 13 years.
Maybe all for the better, I am not complaining. But in re-thinking the premises of the nLab, one sees that in the advertized triple Math + Phys + Philo, one of the three turned out different. The potential name alternative “MathPhysPhil-Lab” which you saw me rejecting in public inner monologue would (besides being awefully clunky) seem like a misnomer.
I don’t like the association of the nLab with category theory. Although category theory is great, the singular focus of much of the category theory community on categories and (n,r)-categories means that a whole lot of other higher mathematical structures get ignored, many of which are not (n,r)-categories.
Incidentally, I am just being informed that there is now a Chinese analog of the nLab (apparently just below a 1000 entries at the moment) which goes (for reasons I won’t try to understand) by the name:
I can’t read Chinese, but from what I could glimpse it looks like on a good path, somewhat reminiscent of what the nLab did look like in the first months.
E.g. here is their entry on group, here is a stub entry on topos (hm, that looks like it might need some more work, maybe).
Re #6, I see the point of removing the apparent nPOV restriction. And I like the idea of it retaining something of the research notebook feel. I wonder, though, whether there’s a limit to the scalability of the latter. Wouldn’t 10s or even 100s of people charting their research paths as they proceed anywhere across the whole of mathematics and physics lead to something confusing? Of course, we’re so far from that that it may seem an odd thing to worry about, but what if someone not at all persuaded by someone else’s approach to a topic looks to rewrite the page from their own perspective?
Perhaps this is just me coming from a completely contested discipline where there’s disagreement even as to who to call a philosopher, let alone what to recognise as a proper problem to address, let alone what counts as a contribution to the problem.
plato.stanford.edu covers all this up very well in the guise of an encyclopaedia. It would be chaos as research notes of 100s of philosophers.
I think the more 0-POV material is being added, the more substrate there is to be given an -POV.
Since the -POV is a point of view: It needs an object that is being viewed. The trouble arises when the -POV becomes mere introspection.
For instance, if users here hadn’t scared away X.-G. Wen when he was contributing serious CMT material, I wouldn’t need to be typing up much of this material now in order to prepare for telling the nPOV story about it.
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