Non-Deductive Logic in Mathematics
James W. Franklin · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2014
If mathematical realism - whether Platonist or Aristotelian - is true, then mathematics is a scientific study of a world ‘out there’. In that case, in addition to methods special to mathematics such as proof, there ought to be a role for ordinary scientific methods such as experiment, conjecture and the confirmation of theories by observations. Those methods should work in mathematics just as well as in science. Mathematics has extra and more certain methods of its own, but that should not prevent ordinary scientific methods from working.