The DOI matches its Crossref record.
What numbers could not be
Abstract
THE attention of the mathematician focuses primarily upon mathematical structure, and his intellectual delight arises (in part) from seeing that a given theory exhibits such and such a structure, from seeing how one structure is modelled in another, or in exhibiting some new structure and showing how it relates to previously studied ones .... But ... the mathematician is satisfied so long as he has some entities or objects (or sets or numbers or functions or ''spaces or ''points) to work with, and he does not inquire into their inner character or ontological status.
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Citations
Cited by
Structural representation and surrogative reasoning
Swoyer, C. (1991) · Synthese · doi:10.1007/bf00499820 · Cited by 414
Mathematics as a Science of Patterns: Ontology and Reference
Resnik, M. D. (1981) · Noûs · doi:10.2307/2214851 · Cited by 369
Vecht, J. J. (2023) · Inquiry · doi:10.1080/0020174x.2020.1787222 · Cited by 35
Metadata
- Authors
- Benacerraf, P.
- Venue
- Philosophy of Mathematics
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- Published
- 1984-01-27
- Pages
- 272-294
- OpenAlex
- W1990179614
- Cited by
- 578
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 53.86
- Type
- book chapter
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
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How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: What numbers could not be. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1017/cbo9781139171519.015
- The paper
- Benacerraf, P. (1984). What numbers could not be. Philosophy of Mathematics. https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139171519.015
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
