The topic of this paper is our knowledge of the natural numbers, and in particular, our knowledge of the basic axioms for the natural numbers, namely the Peano axioms. The thesis defended in this paper is that knowledge of these axioms may be gained by recourse to judgements of probability. While considerations of probability have come to the forefront in recent epistemology, it seems safe to say that the thesis defended here is heterodox from the vantage point of traditional philosophy (...) of mathematics. So this paper focuses on providing a preliminary defense of this thesis, in that it focuses on responding to several objections. Some of these objections are from the classical literature, such as Frege's concern about indiscernibility and circularity, while other are more recent, such as Baker's concern about the unreliability of small samplings in the setting of arithmetic. Another family of objections suggests that we simply do not have access to probability assignments in the setting of arithmetic, either due to issues related to the~$\omega$-rule or to the non-computability and non-continuity of probability assignments. Articulating these objections and the responses to them involves developing some non-trivial results on probability assignments, such as a forcing argument to establish the existence of continuous probability assignments that may be computably approximated. In the concluding section, two problems for future work are discussed: developing the source of arithmetical confirmation and responding to the probabilistic liar. (shrink)

In this paper, we characterize the strength of the predicative Frege hierarchy, , introduced by John Burgess in his book [J. Burgess, Fixing frege, in: Princeton Monographs in Philosophy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2005]. We show that and are mutually interpretable. It follows that is mutually interpretable with Q. This fact was proved earlier by Mihai Ganea in [M. Ganea, Burgess’ PV is Robinson’s Q, The Journal of Symbolic Logic 72 619–624] using a different proof. Another consequence of the our (...) main result is that is mutually interpretable with Kalmar Arithmetic . The fact that interprets EA was proved earlier by Burgess. We provide a different proof. Each of the theories is finitely axiomatizable. Our main result implies that the whole hierarchy taken together, , is not finitely axiomatizable. What is more: no theory that is mutually locally interpretable with is finitely axiomatizable. (shrink)

It can be argued that only the equational theories of some sub-elementary function algebras are finitistic or intuitive according to a certain interpretation of Hilbert's conception of intuition. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relation of those restricted forms of equational reasoning to classical quantifier logic in arithmetic. The conclusion reached is that Edward Nelson's ‘predicative arithmetic’ program, which makes essential use of classical quantifier logic, cannot be justified finitistically and thus requires a different philosophical foundation, possibly (...) as a restricted form of logicism. (shrink)