Contrastive empiricism and indispensability

Erkenntnis 51 (2-3):323-332 (1999)
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Abstract

The Quine-Putnam indispensability argument urges us to place mathematical entities on the same ontological footing as (other) theoretical entities of empirical science. Recently this argument has attracted much criticism, and in this paper I address one criticism due to Elliott Sober. Sober argues that mathematical theories cannot share the empirical support accrued by our best scientific theories, since mathematical propositions are not being tested in the same way as the clearly empirical propositions of science. In this paper I defend the Quine-Putnam argument against Sober's objections.

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Mark Colyvan
University of Sydney

References found in this work

The Scientific Image.William Demopoulos & Bas C. van Fraassen - 1982 - Philosophical Review 91 (4):603.
Mathematics as a science of patterns.Michael David Resnik - 1997 - New York ;: Oxford University Press.
Philosophy of logic.Hilary Putnam - 1971 - London,: Allen & Unwin. Edited by Stephen Laurence & Cynthia Macdonald.
On what there is.W. V. Quine - 1953 - In Willard Van Orman Quine (ed.), From a Logical Point of View. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. pp. 1-19.
Philosophy of Logic.Hilary Putnam - 1971 - New York, NY, USA: Routledge.

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