Thomas_Schminke comments on Math is Subjunctively Objective - Less Wrong

14 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 25 July 2008 11:06AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (116)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Thomas_Schminke 25 July 2008 04:15:44PM 0 points [-]

I would encourage Peter's route related to Quine. A formalist in Phil of Math would say that a mathematical statement is true if it can be derived from axiomatic set theory. That is, the truth of the statement is then grounded in formal logic. This does, of course, beg the question of what grounds our formal logic, but at least it puts basic arithmetic on more firm footing ... in Peter's words, even more deeply imbedded in our belief system.