@Jeruba ”...and not taking a position”
That’s kind of how these things have to be approached, with an open mind and from all directions. It sounds similar to what was discussed at the end of the article I linked above.
“A note on Maddy’s naturalized platonism:”
“Maddy actually thinks that we perceive sets. Number theory, as many logicians are proud to point out, can be reduced to set theory — i.e., numbers can be reduced to sets, which are, of course, generally seen as just another sort of abstract object. Maddy’s move is to bring those sets into the natural world. So that when we see an egg, we are perceiving that egg, but are also perceiving the set containing that egg. (A set containing an object is different from the object itself, you may recall from your math studies.) And that set containing the egg is a natural object, different from the egg itself. But now we run into trouble. Certainly there must be something different between an egg and a set containing that egg; otherwise ‘set containing that egg’ is just a proper name denoting the egg in question, and nothing metaphysical hangs on the distinction. (If you call me “Alec” or “author of this post”, you are not positing the existence of two people — these are just two different names for the same person.) Well, the usual distinguishing feature of abstracta is that they are not spatiotemporally located; but on Maddy’s scheme sets are spatial objects. The problem: Our egg and the set containing it necessarily co-exist in the same exact region of space-time, and yet they are supposed to be different things. In what does this difference consist? Well, certainly nothing physical, otherwise they wouldn’t co-exist in the exact same region of space-time. But then the difference must be something non-physical — i.e., something about the set must be abstract. And if this is the case, then we’re right back to all of the problems inherent in platonism, particularly the problem of how we can have any knowledge of such abstracta.”
@Jeruba “How’m I doing?”
Probably better than me. It’s been so long since I’ve studied this one. I bet @SavoirFaire could have this whole topic clearly explained in a couple of paragraphs, including all of our failures in reasoning. :P