On 7/14/2014 7:30 AM, Bruno Marchal wrote:
On 13 Jul 2014, at 15:09, David Nyman wrote:
On 12 July 2014 20:34, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
Of course they wouldn't because "17 is a prime number" is a tautology. It's
true simply in virtue of it's meaning like "x is x". But is it a fact about
the world or just a fact about language?
I must confess to being somewhat flabbergasted that we're still
debating the semantics and metaphysical provenance of numbers as if it
were in any way relevant to the fundamental topics under discussion.
Agreed. especially that for numbers (or any Turing-complete theory), we know that if we
assume less, we don't get them.
In fact numbers are assumed in all (scientific) theories, and people nitpicking on them
introduce useless metaphysics about them.
I don't know of any scientific theory that usese infinitely many integers.
Brent
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