[gilbert_vanova]

> I doubt there is a single (professional) engineer that would say something like that.

I suspect an engineering professor would be even more compelled to highlight how social consensus is the foundation of everything else that follows. You only have to read the surface layers of this or that performance debate to see how it is unfortunately the case. "Performance" is a fluid term that doesn't mean much of anything on its own -- and people arguing that they've juiced another drop of performance juice from this or that application's fruit are often just talking past each other in terms of priorities or perspective.

The symbolic manipulation at the heart of mathematics is a byproduct of language -- another system beholden to social consensus. It's inescapable.