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   Karl Fogel (kfogel@kfogel.org)'s status on Saturday, 25-Jan-2025 05:32:42 JST Karl Fogel
   A pattern I've noticed:
   
   For many fields of specialization, the core field-specific concepts that outsiders assume are well-defined and unambiguous to specialists are instead, to those within the field, often fuzzy, ill-defined, highly subject to debate, and in some cases even considered to be of questionable ontological utility.
   
   Examples: "species" for biologists; "languages" and "words" for linguists.
   • Embed this notice
     soaproot (soaproot@sfba.social)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 01:48:29 JST soaproot

     in reply to

     @kfogel Would you accept "real number" or "ordinal" in #constructiveMathematics ? Although I suppose that might be too technical of an example; your examples are quite good.

   • Embed this notice
     Karl Fogel (kfogel@kfogel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 01:48:29 JST Karl Fogel

     in reply to

     • soaproot

     @soaproot Heh! I thought about including some things like that from math, but I didn't feel I had enough expertise to be sure about what was and wasn't settled these days. Unlike other fields, math has gone through some cycles of taking care of deferred maintenance -- you know, things like re-establishing calculus on more rigorous basis than its originators had ever bothered with, and the adoption of ZF[C] as a foundational framework. Maybe there are other examples too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_mathematics#Foundational_crisis for those keeping score at home).

     Math is special, quite unlike other fields in its hypertrophied attention to definitional rigor. To provide an example in mathematics, I would have had to get a Ph.D. first, and, you know, it was just one Fediverse post, so was it really worth half a decade in graduate school? Some might answer "yes" to that question, and, indeed, I'm not sure that the answer is "no", but... it was late and I just wanted to hit Submit.