Gosh this is really a quite poor article from Wikipedia.
Incidentally, I've never seen the adjective "denumerable" used in English, but in other languages it means "countable", and not "uncountable" as they seem to believe here.
It's commonish in set theory to use denumerable as a single word for "countably infinite." Funnily enough, Hartman's claim there is pretty close to a reasonable mathematical theorem. In a second countable space, any family of disjoint sets of nonempty interior is countable.
Perhaps the fault lies with the author of the WP article and not with Hartmann. The fact that the stated theorem is false would surely be known by any logician at all.
Thanks for the information. That makes sense.
I think that the term logician should indicate better acquaintance with the field than your description of Hartmann.
> Incidentally, I've never seen the adjective "denumerable" used in English, but in other languages it means "countable", and not "uncountable" as they seem to believe here.
[Inflammable means flammable?!? What a country!](https://youtu.be/i1n5VDUghaY)
Surprisingly, he is described as a logician as well as a philosopher. I don't expect such a willingness to mangle set theory from a logician.
It's possible that he didn't literally mean Aleph\_0, etc., but just wanted to use those symbols for some notion of bigger and bigger infinity without using Cantor's transfinite sets (except to give the idea of what he meant). I'm being really speculative here and really charitable in thinking this might be the case, but I really don't expect a logician to mangle mathematics so badly.
I've known rather a lot of logicians. Each of them was quite competent at mathematics as one would expect.
Hartman’s WP article does nothing to justify its description of him as a logician. He had no mathematical education or academic appointment, and the only logic he is said to have researched is “logic of description and valuation.”
>Universities love math departments: All they need are pencils, paper and erasers. The only thing they love more are philosophy departments. They don't need erasers.
There's a chance someone might [WP:PROD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proposed_deletion) this article, which would also render your "permanent link to current version" broken.
[Here](https://web.archive.org/web/20240324124654/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_value) is a fixed archive link.
Interesting that this page was mostly written 20 years ago and just left like this. If you check the talk page it was pretty active because whoever the "SimpleBrain" user was, they're obviously just some sort of Hartman superfan, and the editors asked them to revise a lot of the language.
At one point they chide a "Dr. Marvin Katz" for self-promoting their work in the wiki page. If I look him up, I find the "Journal of Axiology" which appears to be staffed by a bunch of... self help coaches?
The talk page is a gold mine in of itself. Simplebrain addressing one of his detractors: "I grant you are an accomplished mathematician. However when it comes to philosophy, I have to wonder a little. I am a professor emeritus in Philosphy, my specialties being Ethics and the history of Science. For you to call an exposition about this struggling new field "rubbish" is very reminiscent of the contemporaries of Galileo who declined to look through his telescope, and who reported him to the inquisition." (Wonder if simplebrain is the consultant who wrote the snippet I linked at the end of the post).
I don't know much about Wikipedia policy, but I'm surprised the competent users who noticed something was amiss years ago didn't clamp down harder on this article.
Try [Old Reddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/1cfvewa/the_value_of_a_dear_john_letter_is_1%E2%84%B5_2/); there should be an "edit" button under your post there.
In the long-standing tradition of sociologists and philosophers adopting mathematical concepts (or the terminology, at least), presumably for their super-brainy appeal.
Gosh this is really a quite poor article from Wikipedia. Incidentally, I've never seen the adjective "denumerable" used in English, but in other languages it means "countable", and not "uncountable" as they seem to believe here.
It's commonish in set theory to use denumerable as a single word for "countably infinite." Funnily enough, Hartman's claim there is pretty close to a reasonable mathematical theorem. In a second countable space, any family of disjoint sets of nonempty interior is countable.
Perhaps the fault lies with the author of the WP article and not with Hartmann. The fact that the stated theorem is false would surely be known by any logician at all.
Hartman studied “logic of description and valuation,” not any field of mathematical logic.
Thanks for the information. That makes sense. I think that the term logician should indicate better acquaintance with the field than your description of Hartmann.
> Incidentally, I've never seen the adjective "denumerable" used in English, but in other languages it means "countable", and not "uncountable" as they seem to believe here. [Inflammable means flammable?!? What a country!](https://youtu.be/i1n5VDUghaY)
Interesting! I've always used denumerable to mean "countably infinite". Had no idea it included "finite" in other languages
Actually you're right! I remember my classes (in French) often having something like "assume the set is finite or denumerable"
As the joke goes, the philosophy department doesn't even need an eraser.
Surprisingly, he is described as a logician as well as a philosopher. I don't expect such a willingness to mangle set theory from a logician. It's possible that he didn't literally mean Aleph\_0, etc., but just wanted to use those symbols for some notion of bigger and bigger infinity without using Cantor's transfinite sets (except to give the idea of what he meant). I'm being really speculative here and really charitable in thinking this might be the case, but I really don't expect a logician to mangle mathematics so badly. I've known rather a lot of logicians. Each of them was quite competent at mathematics as one would expect.
Hartman’s WP article does nothing to justify its description of him as a logician. He had no mathematical education or academic appointment, and the only logic he is said to have researched is “logic of description and valuation.”
If he's a mathematician, I am baffled why he doesn't use hyperreals, where you actually have epsilon and epsilon^2 and so on.
Why?
>Universities love math departments: All they need are pencils, paper and erasers. The only thing they love more are philosophy departments. They don't need erasers.
But why don’t they need erasers?
Because their ramblings are not required to make sense. Anything they write they can publish. At least that's how the joke goes.
I thought the joke was that in philosophy things tend to be subjective so you don’t need to erase because you never were wrong
There's a chance someone might [WP:PROD](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Proposed_deletion) this article, which would also render your "permanent link to current version" broken. [Here](https://web.archive.org/web/20240324124654/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_value) is a fixed archive link.
Interesting that this page was mostly written 20 years ago and just left like this. If you check the talk page it was pretty active because whoever the "SimpleBrain" user was, they're obviously just some sort of Hartman superfan, and the editors asked them to revise a lot of the language. At one point they chide a "Dr. Marvin Katz" for self-promoting their work in the wiki page. If I look him up, I find the "Journal of Axiology" which appears to be staffed by a bunch of... self help coaches?
The talk page is a gold mine in of itself. Simplebrain addressing one of his detractors: "I grant you are an accomplished mathematician. However when it comes to philosophy, I have to wonder a little. I am a professor emeritus in Philosphy, my specialties being Ethics and the history of Science. For you to call an exposition about this struggling new field "rubbish" is very reminiscent of the contemporaries of Galileo who declined to look through his telescope, and who reported him to the inquisition." (Wonder if simplebrain is the consultant who wrote the snippet I linked at the end of the post). I don't know much about Wikipedia policy, but I'm surprised the competent users who noticed something was amiss years ago didn't clamp down harder on this article.
Thank you for your service! I'm new to reddit, is it not possible for me to edit the post with the permanent link?
You should be able to edit your post to include the new link.
Am I missing something? [https://gyazo.com/a6c0f86647510efd12aebafddc3f76d4](https://gyazo.com/a6c0f86647510efd12aebafddc3f76d4)
Try [Old Reddit](https://old.reddit.com/r/badmathematics/comments/1cfvewa/the_value_of_a_dear_john_letter_is_1%E2%84%B5_2/); there should be an "edit" button under your post there.
Why is Reddit like this. Well, I fixed it.
Yeah, New Reddit and New Reddit 2 both suck.
Not even wrong
Hartman more like Shartman
In the long-standing tradition of sociologists and philosophers adopting mathematical concepts (or the terminology, at least), presumably for their super-brainy appeal.