Abstract
The delicate point in the formalistic position is to explain how the non-intuitionistic classical mathematics is significant, after having initially agreed with the intuitionists that its theorems lack a real meaning in terms of which they are true (S. C. Kleene, 1952).
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I am grateful to M. K. Davies, Kit Fine, Christopher Peacocke, S. G. Williams and especially Lloyd Humberstone, for comments on an earlier version of this paper. The Kleene quotation at its head is from [10], p. 57.
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Forbes, G. Physicalism, instrumentalism and the semantics of modal logic. J Philos Logic 12, 271–298 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00263479
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00263479