Constructivism (mathematics) - The Place of Constructivism in Mathematics

The Place of Constructivism in Mathematics

Traditionally, some mathematicians have been suspicious, if not antagonistic, towards mathematical constructivism, largely because of limitations they believed it to pose for constructive analysis. These views were forcefully expressed by David Hilbert in 1928, when he wrote in Die Grundlagen der Mathematik, "Taking the principle of excluded middle from the mathematician would be the same, say, as proscribing the telescope to the astronomer or to the boxer the use of his fists".

Errett Bishop, in his 1967 work Foundations of Constructive Analysis, worked to dispel these fears by developing a great deal of traditional analysis in a constructive framework. Nevertheless, some mathematicians do not accept that Bishop did so successfully, since his book is necessarily more complicated than a classical analysis text would be.

Even though most mathematicians do not accept the constructivist's thesis, that only mathematics done based on constructive methods is sound, constructive methods are increasingly of interest on non-ideological grounds. For example, constructive proofs in analysis may ensure witness extraction, in such a way that working within the constraints of the constructive methods may make finding witnesses to theories easier than using classical methods. Applications for constructive mathematics have also been found in typed lambda calculi, topos theory and categorical logic, which are notable subjects in foundational mathematics and computer science. In algebra, for such entities as toposes and Hopf algebras, the structure supports an internal language that is a constructive theory; working within the constraints of that language is often more intuitive and flexible than working externally by such means as reasoning about the set of possible concrete algebras and their homomorphisms.

Physicist Lee Smolin writes in Three Roads to Quantum Gravity that topos theory is "the right form of logic for cosmology" (page 30) and "In its first forms it was called 'intuitionistic logic'" (page 31). "In this kind of logic, the statements an observer can make about the universe are divided into at least three groups: those that we can judge to be true, those that we can judge to be false and those whose truth we cannot decide upon at the present time" (page 28).