(October 15, 2018 at 6:53 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: During a discussion of moral realism in the philosophy subforums, I was reminded that (like ethics) the status of mathematics has been brought into question as an objective enterprise that can produce truth statements.
What say you? Are numbers real? If so, in what way are they real?
Words in general are abstract descriptions of physical things. So this is really a bad argument.
A "Chair" is also an abstract word, describing a REAL object you sit on.
"Uno, and "ichi" and "one" all mean the same thing in different languages.
But if you have "uno orange" or "ichi orange" or "one orange" you have concrete observation of the total of that one object. You can also have "uno son" or "ichi daughter" or "one goldfish". The number is an abstract word to describe a finite number of something, and that is real.
The REAL math humans use to measure everything around us is very real. If it were not, we would not have the science we do today.
