Thread by @ConceptualJames

For pretty obvious reasons, a lot of you are circulating a picture of a real Christian fundamentalist saying that if the Bible said "2+2=5," he'd do all he could to make it true. That's not what the Woke are doing with it, though. It is, in fact, almost exactly the opposite.

The Christian claim there is that if that which they believe is the sole objective authority in the universe, God, declared 2+2=5, then it must be because God is never wrong. That is, they'd say 2+2=5 is objectively true because God said it is and that's what "objective" means.

The Woke are doing the opposite. They're rejecting any possible claim to objectivity. Their argument isn't "two plus two equals five." It's "two plus two CAN EQUAL five." It's a completely different argument. Their point is there is no objectively right answer to the question.

The Christian who said that was making a statement about his beliefs about the existence of objective truth and our ability to know it (read the Bible). The Woke are saying there is no objective truth, and so it all matters on one's perspective as to what is and isn't true.

The Woke aren't *technically* wrong in this except that they are. They're playing a word game where they're changing the fundamental meanings of "two," "five," "plus," and "equals," depending on the context, so that they can say that "context matters." This is a distortion.

It is, in fact, a well-documented rhetorical trick. Nicholas Shackel called it a "Troll's Truism" and completely took it apart in 2005. Dan Dennett (seemingly independently) called it a "deepity" some years later.
philpapers.org/archive/shatvo…

Shackel: "A Troll’s Truism is a mildly ambiguous statement by which an exciting falsehood may trade on a trivial truth."

So, the Troll's Truisms in 2+2=(not 4 because that's just one perspective that's hegemonic) occurs by equivocating on the meanings of 2, 5, +, and =.

The exciting falsehood is "2+2 doesn't have to equal 4!" and the trivial truth it trades upon is "there are other ways to define addition, other groups than Z and R, and so on," which shifts "2+2" out of the context everyone assumes by default for excellent reasons.

It would be truly amazing, indeed, if 2+2, as it is nearly always understood, didn't equal 4, as it is nearly always understood, but this simply isn't true. Neither is 2+2=4 arbitrary just because it relies upon certain axioms like Peano or ZF(C).

I'm shockingly disappointed at how many obviously smart people think they're being mind-expanding by talking about various special-case contexts (many of which don't even work) in which 2+2 seems not to just be 4. You're outsmarting yourselves. It's embarrassing.

Worse, though, you're carrying water for a movement that knows it's using these "mind-expanding" little Troll's Truisms to advance a political agenda that includes standardizing "ethnomathematics" in our educational systems, P-20 if they can get it.

Ethnomathematics would replace developing actual mathematics competence with storytelling and social justice-activism lessons. I'm not making this up. They've explained it in the official state ed documents in the states taking it on (WA and CA).