Philosophy of Mathematics seminar

Sharon Berry, Indiana University Bloomington

Mathematical access worries and accounting for knowledge of logical coherence  

A range of current truth-value realist philosophies of mathematics allow one to reduce the Benacerraf Problem to a problem concerning mathematicians’ ability to recognize which conceptions of pure mathematical structures are coherent – in a sense which can be cashed out in terms of logical possibility. In this paper, I will clarify what it takes to solve this ‘residual’ access problem and then present a framework for solving it.