Page:Astounding Science Fiction v54n06 (1955-02).djvu/160

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"Ah, women are irrational!" If he's somewhat older, more patient, and saner, he'll start with the postulate: "A theory that doesn't yield a useful result isn't a useful theory. The theory "Mary is not rational" may be valid, but it isn’t useful, so I might as well discard that one. I certainly can't solve the problem if I maintain that Mary's behavior can only be described by a wild, discontinuous, fluctuating variable."

You know, that problem seems to bear a strong basic resemblance to the problem of solving a seven-body problem. Maybe Mary isn't irrational at all; maybe the logic system is just inherently incompetent to solve a complex seven-factor problem with the necessary speed and directness. An astronomer has several centuries to figure out Pluto's orbit; Bill doesn't have quite that much leisure in solving his problem.

Could be that's what the social scientists mean when they say that mathematics doesn't work in their field. It doesn't work in any field where it has to consider a simultaneously mutually interacting system of multiple factors, save by multiple approximation. Try it some time when 160,000,000 individual factors are interacting in varying degree, and you'll understand why politics is an art, not a science.

Anyhow, what Bill and Mary need, evidently, is a logic that works in a nonobjective system. (So do the astronomers; they want a mathematics that can actually handle multi-body problems without playing the game of "We'll pretend the other seven bodies aren't present.")

Bertrand Russell found that Logic involves the proposition that the Class of All Classes cannot be a member of itself. That is, in essence, what the "objective viewpoint" means; you can't logically consider a problem when logical consideration of the problem is itself part of the problem. That produces an infinite series of fluctuating corrections, and no con-