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person1960s-present

Paul Benacerraf

Disciplines:
epistemology
philosophy of mathematics

Summary

American philosopher who posed Benacerraf's dilemma — if mathematical objects are abstract entities, how can we have knowledge of them? — and argued that numbers cannot be sets because there is no principled choice among competing set-theoretic reductions.

Core Contribution

What Numbers Could Not Be (1965): numbers are not sets because any omega-sequence serves as well; there are no facts about which sets numbers are. Mathematical Truth (1973): a platonist semantics (mathematical sentences are literally true of abstract objects) and a causal-epistemic theory of knowledge are incompatible — Benacerraf's dilemma.

Key Spikes & Highlights

  • Benacerraf's dilemma has reshaped the entire epistemology of mathematics: either mathematical sentences are not literally true of abstract objects (nominalism) or we must explain how causal isolation is compatible with mathematical knowledge.
  • The set-theoretic indeterminacy argument is formally simple but philosophically devastating: if 2 = {{∅}} is as good as 2 = {∅, {∅}}, there are no facts about which it is, so numbers are not sets.

Notable Works & Achievements

What Numbers Could Not Be

Mathematical Truth

Historical Influences

W. V. O. Quine Gottlob Frege

Intellectual Lineage

Analytic Philosophy Philosophy of Mathematics

Contemporaries & Peers

Hilary Putnam W. V. O. Quine

Minds Influenced

Hartry Field Penelope Maddy Stewart Shapiro

Intellectual Posterity

Benacerraf's DilemmaIndeterminacy in Mathematics

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