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It's possible that a mathematician with philosophical commitments is more likely to be a Platonist than a formalist, but I suspect that most mathematicians are
by cokernel 10y ago
It's possible that a mathematician with philosophical commitments is more likely to be a Platonist than a formalist, but I suspect that most mathematicians are neither ("Philosophy is for the philosophers"). The so-called "naive" view that most mathematicians may be described as having ("I'm discovering something real when I prove a theorem", "Mathematics is objective", and so on) certainly sounds similar to the language used by Platonists, but I have yet to run into a mathematician who is comfortable with the logical conclusions of a strict Platonism. In particular, there are epistemological problems with Platonism (how can we know anything about non-physical entities?) that cause problems in the justification of mathematics and would be nice to be able to ignore.
- samth 10y agoI think we mostly agree on the empirical issues -- mathematicians usually don't care about the philosophical issues, and espouse naive Platonism which they haven't thought through. However, I don't think it's right to say that they're formalist just because they wouldn't agree, upon reflection, with Platonism's conclusions. I (like a lot of computer scientists) am a formalist, but it's not fair to say that other people secretly agree with me because I think Platonism has major flaws.