[Agda] Why dependent type theory?
James McKinna
james.mckinna at ed.ac.uk
Sun Mar 8 14:35:42 CET 2020
Martin, on Fri, 06 Mar 2020, you wrote:
> In other words, choose your proof assistant as a function of what
> you want to talk about *and* how you want to talk about it. Martin
>
> On 06/03/2020 21:05, Martin Escardo wrote:
>> The troubling aspect of proof assistants is that they not only
>> implement proof checking (and definition checking, construction
>> checking etc.) but that also that each of them proposes a new
>> foundation of mathematics.
>>
>> Which is sometimes not precisely specified, as it is the case of
>> e.g. Agda. (Which is why I, as an Agda user, I confine myself to a
>> well-understood subset of Agda corresponding to a (particular)
>> well-understood type theory.
>>
>> For mathematically minded users of proof assistants, like myself,
>> this is a problem. We are not interested in formal proofs per se.
>> We are interested in what we are talking about, with rigorously
>> stated assumptions about our universe of discourse.
Martin,
I largely agree with you (at least in terms of my practice as an Agda
user; users of other proof assistants should look to their own
consciences regarding well-known and less-well-known sources of
potential inconsistency in (implementations of) their favourite
foundations), but I had a mind a separation even at the level you
allude to:
-- that mathematicians are not/need not be bound by the
restrictions/stipulations of a given foundational system; rather that
they develop appropriate language/meta-language for their own eventual
mathematical needs, and that such processes are very much historically
bound, and subject to the dynamics of paradigm change in terms of the
(greater) explanatory power of the paradigm within which they work;
the example of Grothendieck developing a raft of categorical
techniques in order to be able to successfully carry out his research
programme in algebraic geometry being only one of the most
familiar/famous/notorious; Kevin's and others' use of lean in the
formalisation of perfectoid spaces suggest another such case, where
the tool(s), and in particular their expressivity wrt the concepts
being studied, made them more immediately ready-at-hand than any mere
reduction to set theory (even if that were a possibility-in-principle
with ZFC/TG implementations in Isabelle, Mizar or Egal);
-- that concern for (consistency of such) foundations has,
historically at least, typically lagged behind the mathematical
developments; though against that, one might say that the Grothendieck
school were precisely concerned with developing such foundations,
hand-in-hand with the dazzling mathematics they carried out therein
(an example of a much longer gap between the mathematical development,
and putting it on satisfactory foundations might lie in the history of
distributions from Heaviside to Schwartz; or the foundations of
geometry after the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries...); the
contemporary frenzy of activity on a number of fronts in
higher-dimensional (categorical) algebra via homotopy type theory
suggests a similar interplay between the development of
'mathematics-of' and 'foundations-for'.
The Kolmogorov paper (as well as, for example, Lawvere's insistence on
(a) 'logic' as somehow a conceptual secondary notion to the
categorical structure which supports it, and indeed Brouwer's
conception of logic as part of mathematics (and not the other way
round, which perhaps seems strange to those who see the field of proof
assistants as somehow the triumph of the logicist/formalist
programme)) suggests that the logic of mathematical 'problems' (and
their solutions) emerges from the domain of such problems. (What K
points out as a "remarkable fact" is that such logic turns out to be
(Heyting's formalisation of) Brouwer's intuitionistic logic, and such
congruence would repeat itself 40 years later with the internal logic
of toposes. )
It almost seems (to me at least), that the development and use of
proof assistants has refocused our attention on the possibility that
the 'Grundlagenstreit' was not a single historical moment, with a
right/wrong outcome, but part of the dynamics of mathematical
development: to each age its mathematics, and to each such
mathematics, not only its freedom, but also its appropriate
foundations. But that's not to say that we can, or should, be blas'e
about such things. I'm sorry if my earlier post suggested otherwise.
James.
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