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I find what's written on that page much more naive than Knapp's view. Knapp is not advocating fictionalism, i.e. that math has no meaning. He is advocating the
by jules 13y ago
I find what's written on that page much more naive than Knapp's view. Knapp is not advocating fictionalism, i.e. that math has no meaning. He is advocating the opposite: math has meaning, but the reason is not some metaphysical mystery, it has meaning because it was constructed for that purpose. Knapp's view is much closer to what that page describes as physicalism, with the caveat that humans are not perfect so our math is not necessarily the same as alien math.
That is also one of the instances where that page is so naive. It dismisses physicalism in a just a couple of words on the grounds that physicalism cannot explain infinities, especially very large infinities. But mathematicians themselves are divided on whether those are "real" or just an artifact of the axioms (see constructivism and more radically finitism). Another view that fits perfectly within physicalism is that infinities are just an approximation, a reasoning tool to simplify things.