Science in the Looking Glass: What do scientists really know? by E. Brian Davies, Oxford University Press, £25, ISBN 0198525435 Reviewed by Robert Crease
THE title suggests a comprehensive study of scientific epistemology – the theory of what constitutes knowledge. But Davies, a professor of mathematics at King’s College London, is mainly concerned with debunking the Platonist account of mathematics, which he describes as the view that “numbers exist independently in some objective sense”.
Davies has many reasons for opposing mathematical Platonism, including the existence of controversy in mathematics, the importance of history to understanding it and the presence of an…
