Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

nevertheless the use of mathematics kind of suggests a reliance on an independent truth. Some philosophers even suggest that for truth to be properly empirical there should be no intermediate (rational) theory, whilst others question if this is even possible.

Science’s use of mathematics is basically a rationalist approach. What is happening here is that a scientific theory is put forward which tries to make objects or events in the real world correspond to the formal system of mathematics and then to draw conclusions by deduction. Science, in effect, is piggy-backing on the supposed greater certainty of deduction, via mathematics and logic. So, if the reader has followed the descriptions carefully above, then this link to mathematics takes science out of the realm of empiricism and into the realm of pure reasoning. But, in fact, an inductive leap is being made to try to make mathematics correspond to reality. It is truly amazing how effective this method has been and how wonderfully the real world does in fact seem to correspond with the truths of mathematics. It has led some to speculate whether the truths of mathematics (and by implication science) have some kind of independent existence. Did they exist before the universe began or do they somehow exist outside the universe as well as inside?

The truth which mathematics derives from its axioms is coherent within the system (i.e. within mathematics itself) but notice that it does not necessarily correspond to events in the external world. So here is our third type of foundational truth — coherentism — and it could be added

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