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Philosophical aspects of logic and set theory; truth status of mathematical axioms; Philosophy of Mathematics; philosophical aspects of mathematics in general; relation of mathematics to philosophy; etc. Consider also posting at http://philosophy.stackexchange.com/, where philosophy-of-mathematics is one of the most popular tags.

18 votes
Accepted

Are all mathematical theorems necessarily true?

Apart from the storm of comments, let me just try to answer the question. There are several ways in a which a mathematical theorem can be contingent. First, the independence phenomenon in set theo …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
20 votes

Supervenience in mathematics

To my way of thinking, the most natural example of supervenience in mathematics---and the most similar to how this term is used in the philosophy of mind, where one uses it to describe the relation of …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
5 votes

What is against having distinct membership relations on sets in the Platonic realm?

It turns out that one cannot have two fundamentally different parallel set membership relations $\in$ and $\in^*$, if they both satisfy ZF with respect to the common language, for in this case they mu …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
8 votes

Mathematical analysis of Lewisian concepts, esp. natural properties

I have engaged with the Lewis-style set-theoretic mereology in a few papers, undertaken jointly with Makoto Kikuchi. My interest in this topic was inspired originally by a MathOverflow question, Why h …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
6 votes

Proof by `universal receiver'

It is very common in set theory to prove that a particular model or structure is well-founded by mapping it into a fixed well-founded structure. The point is that if $j:\langle M,{\in^M}\rangle\to \la …
3 votes
Accepted

Formal definition of 'useful' ?

It seems to me that you have two questions here. First, you inquire about a formal account of "usefulness". I believe that this is already provided by the formal mathematical accounts of utility in …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
25 votes

The Importance of ZF

There is a very active ongoing debate within set theory about whether mathematics needs new axioms, and philosophers of mathematics are weighing in on all sides. Relevant considerations include many v …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
5 votes

Unprovable sentence about integers

Let $A$ be any set of natural numbers that is computably enumerable, but not decidable. There are numerous natural instances of such sets, such as the set of all finite presentations of the trivial gr …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
14 votes

Are proper classes objects?

Let me offer another answer in counterpoint to Andreas's answer, by pointing out a number of cases in set theory where it seems that a second-order treatment of classes, as in Goedel-Bernays set theor …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
5 votes
Accepted

Are ITTM's necessary to compute Turing's "computable numbers" and what does that mean for or...

No, classical computability theory as you point is quite capable of dealing with infinitary computable enumerations and computability-in-the-limit from its earliest stages. I believe that Turing is to …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
13 votes
Accepted

Ontological status of some "sets" in ZFC

Although you've been given a hard time in the comments, I think that this is actually a serious question in the philosophy of mathematics, whose answer depends on one's philosophical position concerni …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
48 votes

Contemporary philosophy of mathematics

Let me mention a few current issues on which I have been involved in the philosophy of mathematics. Of course there are also many other issues on which people are working. Debate on pluralism. First, …
2 votes

Quantification over uncountable sets

There are several things one can say. The theory of ZFC without powerset is often denoted by $\newcommand\ZFCm{\text{ZFC}^-}\ZFCm$. One has to be a little careful with what it means, since collection …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
36 votes
Accepted

Meta$^{n{-}th}$ mathematics

My opinion is that there is no crisp distinction between mathematics, metamathematics and meta-metamathematics, and the subjects thoroughly blend one into another in such a way that prevents any coher …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar
14 votes

Physics and Church–Turing Thesis

There is a body of literature on the topic of supertasks, which are computational tasks involving infinitely many steps. A large part of this work involves a purely mathematical analysis and developme …
Joel David Hamkins's user avatar

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