I'm in Favor of Being Humble. I Like That.

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'I would be happier if there were some principled reason why i should expect the laws of physics to be just as good to morrow as they were yesterday,' he says. 'You know, aalove. No one ever promised you a rose garden.' He goes on to say that when your axioms are powerful enough to include arithmetic, what follows from the axioms is not the whole story because of these different models. But then there's this extra leap that comes at the end - we can find other axioms that more powerfully dictate p or not p. That means there are more truths that are not being captured by the axiom system.

Are numbers real? What does that even mean? You can’t kick a number. But you can talk about numbers in useful ways, and we use numbers to talk about the real world. There’s surely a kind of reality there. On the other hand, Luke Skywalker isn’t a real person, but we talk about him all the time. Maybe we can talk about unreal things in useful ways. Jody Azzouni is one of the leading contemporary advocates of nominalism, the view that abstract objects are not “things,” they are merely labels we use in talking about things. A deeply philosophical issue, but one that has implications for how we think about physics and the laws of nature.

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Jody Azzouni received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the City University of New York. He is currently a professor of philosophy at Tufts University. In addition to his philosophical work, he is an active writer of fiction and poetry.

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