On Culture (2010-)

"The answers to the human problems of ecology are to be found in economy. And the answers to the problems of economy are to be found in culture and character. To fail to see this is to go on dividing the world falsely between guilty producers and innocent consumers." (Wendell Berry, "What Are People For?: Essays", 2010)

"Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion." (Tariq Ramadan, "Islam and the Arab Awakening", 2012)

"Scientific method is the gateway into scientific discoveries that in turn prompt technological advances and cultural influences." (Hugh G Gauch Jr., "Scientific Method in Brief", 2012)

"A mathematical entity is a concept, a shared thought. Once you have acquired it, you have it available, for inspection or manipulation. If you understand it correctly (as a student, or as a professional) your ‘mental model’ of that entity, your personal representative of it, matches those of others who understand it correctly. (As is verified by giving the same answers to test questions.) The concept, the cultural entity, is nothing other than the collection of the mutually congruent personal representatives, the ‘mental models’, possessed by those participating in the mathematical culture." (Reuben Hersh, "Experiencing Mathematics: What Do We Do, when We Do Mathematics?", 2014)

"Culture is fuzzy, easy to caricature, amenable to oversimplifications, and often used as a catchall when all other explanations fail." (Zachary Karabell, "The Leading Indicators: A short history of the numbers that rule our world", 2014)

"All cultures organize themselves around a story, which tells them how the world came into being - a creation myth." (William Byers, "Deep Thinking: What Mathematics Can Teach Us About the Mind", 2015)

"Paradigm change necessarily involves a discontinuous jump. Reality is singular and each paradigm evokes its own reality. This is the reason that scientific paradigms are not changed without a great deal of conflict; the reason why deep thinking is so difficult and involves overcoming so much resistance both in the individual and in the larger culture. In fact it has been said that a scientist never really gives up the paradigm within which she has been trained." (William Byers, "Deep Thinking: What Mathematics Can Teach Us About the Mind", 2015)

"When a culture is founded on the principle of immediacy of experience, there is no need for numeracy. It is impossible to consume more than one thing at a time, so differentiating between 'a small amount', 'a larger amount' and 'many' is enough for survival." (The Open University, "Understanding the environment: learning and communication", 2016)

"History of mathematics is done by mathematicians as well as historians. History models mathematics as a segment of the ongoing story of human culture. Mathematicians are likely to see the past through the eyes of the present, and ask, ‘Was it important? natural? deep? surprising? elegant?’ The historian sees mathematics as a thread in the ever-growing web of human life, intimately interwoven with finance and technology, with war and peace. Today's mathematics is the culmination of all that has happened before now, yet to future viewpoints it will seem like a brief, outmoded stage of the past." (Reuben Hersh, "Mathematics as an Empirical Phenomenon, Subject to Modeling", 2017)