Chapter 4: Scripting the World in Mathematics and its Ethical Implications

Mathematics is a language, a formalism, a school discipline, a research area, an engineering tool, a logic for reasoning, a social practice. Mathematics can be applied, but it can also be claimed to be pure; it can be dynamic, but it can also be frozen; it can inform and illuminate, but also hide and obscure. So what is this “it” that can be so many different things?

We can try to describe the nature of mathematics from many perspectives. One might think that if we observe mathematics from different, for example, sociological, philosophical, and educational angles, we will come to understand what “it” is, and how “it” may function. However, this idea is not quite adequate because we cannot assume that the different perspectives focus on the same thing. So, instead we could argue that the perspective we choose determines, at least in part, what it is we are observing.