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.
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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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