November 20, 2005
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“There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of Pontius Pilate’s unanswered question ‘What is truth?’”
– H. S. M. Coxeter,
1987, introduction to Richard J. Trudeau’s remarks on the “Story
Theory” of truth as opposed to the “Diamond Theory” of truth in The Non-Euclidean Revolution“A new epistemology is emerging to replace the Diamond Theory of truth.
I will call it the ‘Story Theory’ of truth: There are no diamonds.
People make up stories about what they experience. Stories that catch
on are called ‘true.’ The Story Theory of truth is itself a story that
is catching on. It is being told and retold, with increasing frequency,
by thinkers of many stripes*….”– Richard J. Trudeau in
The Non-Euclidean Revolution“‘Deniers’ of truth… insist that each of us is trapped in his own
point of view; we make up stories about the world and, in an exercise
of power, try to impose them on others.”– Jim Holt in The New Yorker.
(Click on the box below.)
Exercise of Power:Show that a white horse–
a figure not unlike the
symbol of the mathematics
publisher Springer–
is traced, within a naturally
arranged rectangular array of
polynomials, by the powers of x
modulo a polynomial
irreducible over a Galois field.This horse, or chess knight–
“Springer,” in German–
plays a role in “Diamond Theory”
(a phrase used in finite geometry
in 1976, some years before its use
by Trudeau in the above book).Related material
On this date:
In 1490, The White Knight
(Tirant lo Blanc
)–
a major influence on Cervantes–
was published, and in 1910
the Mexican Revolution began.
Illustration:
Zapata by Diego Rivera,
Museum of Modern Art,
New York“First published in the Catalan language in Valencia in 1490…. Reviewing the first modern Spanish translation in 1969
(Franco had ruthlessly suppressed the Catalan language and literature),
Mario Vargas Llosa hailed the epic’s author as ‘the first of that
lineage of God-supplanters– Fielding, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert,
Tolstoy, Joyce, Faulkner– who try to create in their novels an
all-encompassing reality.’”
