What is it about?
Some philosophers believe that we should not believe that there are objective moral truths independent of human beliefs or conventions, because if there were such truths, we would have no way of explaining how we could come to know what they were. The same argument applies to the claim that there are objective mathematical truths that are independent from human conventions. In this article I discuss this challenge and find that given a set of assumptions that many authors assume, it is not such a difficult challenge after all.
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Why is it important?
The challenge I discuss here, called by some 'the reliability challenge' or 'the Benacerraf-Field challenge' is considered to be one of the most pressing challenges to mathematical platonism and to moral realism. It is therefore a significant contribution to philosophy of mathematics and to metaethics if this challenge can be solved as easily as I claim that it could.
Perspectives
I must admit that I don't believe that everything I claim in this article is true. I explain at the end some of my suspicions. I see this article as a way of showing that combining the various assumptions that I do, we get a surprising result. Either one of my assumptions is false, or we should accept the conclusion. You can take this article as a challenge to figure out where things have gone wrong in this debate.
Dan Baras
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: OUR RELIABILITY IS IN PRINCIPLE EXPLAINABLE, Episteme, March 2016, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/epi.2016.5.
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