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  1. Scientific Platonism.Alexander Paseau - 2007 - In Mary Leng, Alexander Paseau & Michael D. Potter (eds.), Mathematical Knowledge. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 123-149.
    Does natural science give us reason to believe that mathematical statements are true? And does natural science give us reason to believe in some particular metaphysics of mathematics? These two questions should be firmly distinguished. My argument in this chapter is that a negative answer to the second question is compatible with an affirmative answer to the first. Loosely put, even if science settles the truth of mathematics, it does not settle its metaphysics.
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  2. Mathematical instrumentalism, Gödel’s theorem, and inductive evidence.Alexander Paseau - 2011 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 42 (1):140-149.
    Mathematical instrumentalism construes some parts of mathematics, typically the abstract ones, as an instrument for establishing statements in other parts of mathematics, typically the elementary ones. Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem seems to show that one cannot prove the consistency of all of mathematics from within elementary mathematics. It is therefore generally thought to defeat instrumentalisms that insist on a proof of the consistency of abstract mathematics from within the elementary portion. This article argues that though some versions of mathematical instrumentalism (...)
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  3. Letter Games: A Metamathematical Taster.Alexander Paseau - 2016 - The Mathematical Gazette 100 (549):442-449.
    The aim of this article is to give students a small sense of what metamathematics is—that is, how one might use mathematics to study mathematics itself. School or college teachers could base a classroom exercise on the letter games I shall describe and use them as a springboard for further exploration. Since I shall presuppose no knowledge of formal logic, the games are less an introduction to Gödel's theorems than an introduction to an introduction to them. Nevertheless, they show, in (...)
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  4. Proving Induction.Alexander Paseau - 2011 - Australasian Journal of Logic 10:1-17.
    The hard problem of induction is to argue without begging the question that inductive inference, applied properly in the proper circumstances, is conducive to truth. A recent theorem seems to show that the hard problem has a deductive solution. The theorem, provable in ZFC, states that a predictive function M exists with the following property: whatever world we live in, M ncorrectly predicts the world’s present state given its previous states at all times apart from a well-ordered subset. On the (...)
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  5. Justifying induction mathematically: Strategies and functions.Alexander Paseau - 2008 - Logique Et Analyse 51 (203):263.
    If the total state of the universe is encodable by a real number, Hardin and Taylor have proved that there is a solution to one version of the problem of induction, or at least a solution to a closely related epistemological problem. Is this philosophical application of the Hardin-Taylor result modest enough? The paper advances grounds for doubt. [A longer and more detailed sequel to this paper, 'Proving Induction', was published in the Australasian Journal of Logic in 2011.].
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  6. What the foundationalist filter kept out.Alexander Paseau - 2005 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 36 (1):191-201.
    From title to back cover, a polemic runs through David Corfield's "Towards a Philosophy of Real Mathematics". Corfield repeatedly complains that philosophers of mathematics have ignored the interesting and important mathematical developments of the past seventy years, ‘filtering’ the details of mathematical practice out of philosophical discussion. His aim is to remedy the discipline’s long-sightedness and, by precept and example, to redirect philosophical attention towards current developments in mathematics. This review discusses some strands of Corfield’s philosophy of real mathematics and (...)
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  7. Philosophy of Mathematics.Alexander Paseau (ed.) - 2016 - New York: Routledge.
    Mathematics is everywhere and yet its objects are nowhere. There may be five apples on the table but the number five itself is not to be found in, on, beside or anywhere near the apples. So if not in space and time, where are numbers and other mathematical objects such as perfect circles and functions? And how do we humans discover facts about them, be it Pythagoras’ Theorem or Fermat’s Last Theorem? The metaphysical question of what numbers are and the (...)
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