(August 25, 2021 at 2:12 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote: When you see how much of modern science assumes Plato, he seems much less antiquated and more of a visionary.
I agree that most scientists lapse into Platonism, but I'm not sure that Platonism can be defended. I find myself talking like a Platonist, but in reality, both science and mathematics are based on Pragmatism.
Science never reveals true forms. We discover patterns that are useful, and create theories based on the predictive ability of those patterns. The patterns themselves may be real, but we notice them because we find them useful. The theories we create are never Platonically real - they are more like "stories" that happen to work a lot better than the old stories.