Here we go again.

I'm so annoyed with amateur hour at philosophy moving the ball for radicals, and you should be too. https://twitter.com/kareem_carr/status/1298991910636453888

"Is math real?" is the wrong question. Someone in the replies immediately said that it depends on one's definition of "real," and this is correct and not in a silly way, but it's also still the wrong question.

Mathematics is a collection of abstractions about certain topics. In the sense that we recognize abstractions as things people do, math is real. We really have abstracted about matters of measurement and numeracy, but that's not really good enough.

Because mathematics is a collection of abstractions, it is not "real" in the sense that a car or tree or table is real. It's almost right to say that you can't look out into the world and find mathematics because it's not really there. It's abstractions.

This is, itself, misleading, though, because our mathematical abstractions mostly begin with and extend from abstractions about reality. In that sense, math is both real and "out there," and this is the particular point postmodern dilettantes like our simpy friend here love.

The crux of whether or not mathematics is "real" is whether or not it describes things that correspond to a shared objective reality, to which the answer is a complicated yes. Certainly, our basic numbers and shapes do this, though it gets messy.

Ideas like "infinity" aren't known whether or not they correspond to reality (I think they don't, honestly), but they make a kind of sense abstractly. Ideas like "four" clearly do: once you define a stable category of thing, collecting four of them defines fourness.

Ideas like "circle" are more complicated because a circle is all of the points exactly the same distance (the radius) from another point, which is a one-dimensional object that appears in two dimensions, and those things aren't real.

Moreover, because the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter is always pi, which is a transcendental irrational number, it is impossible (unless infinity is real) to have an exactly perfect circle portrayed in reality. None of this is mystifying to responsible adults.

It's perfectly fine to have concepts that are abstractions that correspond to reality in extremely faithful (never perfect) and immanently useful ways, and to consider this a functional definition for "real" without confusing yourself and others about the fact that they're ideas.

So much of postmodernist thinking trades off this cheap philosophy 101 trick that impresses clever (but not smart) sophomores: we have to represent the real world in language to understand it and communicate it. tHE MaP iSnT thE tERrAiN!!!

This is why grown-ups who hope to make things more clear, not less, would talk about realism, not "is it real?", when talking about something like a scientific model or mathematical concepts. The question isn't if the idea is real, which is high-times philosopher nonsense.

The question is "does the abstraction at hand correspond in some faithful (and probably useful) way to reality?" If the answer is yes, then we tend to be casual with our philosophy and say "it's real." If no, we don't. This inspires no confusion in serious thinkers.

The postmodern trick is to trade off this map not being the terrain thing, then to claim that the map was drawn by people who have biases and political self-interest in keeping their power, so the map isn't just conceptual, it's biased in unjust ways that need interrogation.

This is sometimes true but not always true, but the postmodernists' radical game is to insist for silly reasons that it's not only always true and always relevant, but the feature that is *most relevant* to the discussion. That's what's being used to radicalize math.

In our present era, true postmodernism is dead, and what is being forwarded is a set of postmodern tools being used to do critical theory, so the politics take on a particularly serious conflict-theory dimension of oppression versus liberation from oppression.

Our simpy friend, Carr, is using the spooky question "Is math real?" as a wedge to create aporia, to get people to think they don't know as much as they think they do and to create wonder. That will be filled in with some nonsense, if not by him, by his activist friends.

We've seen this again and again. People who are deliberately trying to confuse you by removing clarity are not your friends. They come off as friendly and play cute, but they're not, even if their intentions are innocent (in which case they're being used).