>>12886000I actually agree that there may be 'alternative' ways of looking at math that we're philosophically blind to, at present, but I don't see (1) how that entails that math is a social construct, and (2) how it is related to different counting systems.
Different counting systems actually challenge the idea that mathematics is a social construct. By definition, different counting systems are different notations developed to encode the same kind of information - namely, arithmetic. The fact that all of these counting system are so different in how the information is encoded, but they still nevertheless model the same arithmetic and algebraic properties, actually seems like an argument that suggests that all of these different system represent or encode the same numerical laws and principle.
The very fact that we are able to identify these various coding schemes as all somehow representing arithmetic, is itself because all of these systems were reaching at the same thing, i.e. all of these culture actually had a similar understanding of basic arithmetic, i.e. arithmetic can't be purely a social construct.
I don't even know what to make of the argument. It's simply retarded on a basic, fundamental level. Somehow the fact that other cultures used different notation to express arithmetic proves that arithmetic is a social construct? Okay, these very same culture also used different notations to express language, i.e. different writing systems for encoding noise. So by that reasoning is noise a social construct just because different cultures have different ways of representing human mouth noises in writing?
What about water? Is the existence of water a social construct because in English we call it water and in Spanish they call it agua?
If you take a photo of a car from two different angles, does the fact that both representations of the car look different somehow prove that the car is a social construct?
