----- Original Message ----- From: "andie nachgeborenen" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I don't see what is so problematic about the idea of abstract entities. The world is full of weird entities that it is useful to posit -- that is, to say that they exist. Classes. Quarks (those are physical, but strange). Meanings. Minds. Why not numbers? But if we say that they exist, at least in my book, we mean it, it's not "as if," it's not pretend. I know some people have an urge -- Ive had it myself -- to make everything explicable in physical terms. But that's a metaphysical prejudice. Why does everything have to be physical? jks ==================== Occam's razor drives a lot of it. Should we say that the English language existed before human beings, or the Chinese language? These are as abstract as the language of mathematics and we have no way of determining, with language/symbols, whether mathematics has non-linguistic/non-symbolic properties of any kind. If we can explain the emergence of the English or Chinese language via a contemporary and future cosmology and theory of biological evolution [esp. neuroscience] without resorting to a dualist or pluralist metaphysics, why shouldn't we be able to do the same with mathematics? I don't get the 'indispensibility' argument for Platonism in math simply because it doesn't seem to cohere well with what we know about ourselves as a result of evolutionary biology. I'm not asserting that we 'need' a reductionist cosmology/metaphysics, just that we don't need to think of mathematics as preexisting/older than humans in some metaspatial-temporal.....what, exactly? Htbw, Ian
