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back on that 2-ways-of-looking-at-nature (mathematical/non-mathematical) theme

Okay, these are just philosophical doodlings that I hope will still make sense when I look at them again tomorrow.

It occurred to me that what Aristotle calls techne and Aquinas calls ars might be called engineering in English.  That is, the systematic knowledge of how to make something.  More than a trademan's skill.  The creative ability of an architect, engineer, cure-finder-in-medicine, a chef who invents a new recipe... stuff like that.

In any case, it pertains to such "engineers" to look at items in nature as instruments in new sense of the term "instrument."  They look at such an item as capable of serving diverse human purposes.  Perhaps such a way of seeing nature is part of a process that leads to the inquiry into things having purposes of their own apart from instrumentality to human goals.  But that is another theme for another day.  For now I want to explore the relation between this instrumentality and math.

It seems to me that math, very broadly considered, is the language of an engineer's (as likewise defined broadly) instrumentality.  Use so many teaspoons of sugar.  Cut the wood this length.  If the person has these symptoms, then do that (hypo reasoning here seen ala Bertrand Russell?).  Stuff like that goes into engineering thought. 

Also, think of necessity as it pertains to mathematical and hypothetical relations...

It also pertains to engineering to model things.  That is, math is closely tied to models that represent things.  More on this later.

But the gist of all of this is claim that much of modernity consists of engineering rationality becoming generalized.  That is, there is more than one way to relate nature to math... moderns learn alot from engineering's way...

More later.

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