On the truth of mathematics.

Nick Thomas April 7, 2013

Abstract We suggest that the following three statements cannot simultaneously be true. (1) Mathematics is true. (2) True statements refer to existent objects. (3) There is no Platonic world of mathematical forms.

In conversation, Timothy Human remarks to me that circles do not exist. He points out that nobody has ever observed a physical object which was perfectly circular. When mathematicians talk about circles, what are they talking about? The situation is worse with other mathematical objects. Does the number ve exist? Certainly there are cases in the real world where there are ve of something. But where is the number ve itself? We can ask similar, and harder, questions. Where is the empty set? Where is the ordinal number 0 ? Where is R in the uniform topology? Most agree that mathematics is true. Math is essentially the only discipline in which all experts agree about essentially everything. In modern times, all disagreements in mathematics have been reduced to questions of which axioms to accept; and these controversies hardly touch the practice of mainstream mathematics at all, but only arise in rather specialized foundational discussions. Furthermore, no counterexample has ever been found to any widely accepted mathematical theorem. By these measures, mathematics is the most certain of all disciplines. But mathematics is an unusual discipline in that, unlike in the case of the physical and social sciences, it is not clear what, if anything, it is studying. Nobody has ever observed the existence of a circle. Answering the basic question of what a number is, or if there is such a thing as a number, is dicult. And much of mathematics studies innite objects, though the universe may well be nite. Most feel the presence of a problem at this juncture. Let us try to articulate what the problem is. A basic assumption of scientic inquiry is that there is an objective reality, that we can learn about this objective reality through our senses, and that the objective reality itself is more than what we perceive with our senses at any one time. Commonly, but not always, we will say that a statement is true if and only if it correctly describes some objects in objective reality. This type of position is called a correspondence theory of truth. 1

Suppose we accept a correspondence theory of truth, and that mathematics is true. Then, for example, a unit circle has radius is a true statement; so it refers to existent objects. In particular, a unit circle exists. Similar arguments show the existence of a whole host of mathematical objects which, as far as we know, do not or cannot exist in the physical world. So our hypotheses imply the existence of some non-physical realm in which mathematical objects exist. This is typically called a Platonic world of mathematical forms, and the position that one exists is called Platonism. Our argument shows that these three statements cannot simultaneously be true: 1. Mathematics is true. 2. True statements refer to existent objects. 3. There is no Platonic world of mathematical forms. We leave the reader with the question: which horn of the disjunctive is to be rejected?