Author:  Pedro M. Rosario Barbosa
Copyright: 2008, Creative Commons Corporation

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This book is the first of a series of books on the subject of underdetermination or subdetermination of science.  A particular view of scientific theories pertaining to this subject has become popular since the publication of Willard Van Orman Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism".  According to it, formal sciences such as logic and mathematics can be revised in light of recalcitrant experience.

This book states that only a platonist view of mathematics can account for the real relationship between formal science and natural science.  For platonism to be a viable option, a particular philosophical doctrine is endorsed, namely that of Edmund Husserl.  If we regard mathematical entities as formal-ontological categories and mathematics as a mathesis universalis, we are able to hold a platonist proposal that agrees with contemporary mathematics and provides an adequate mathematical epistemology.  Once the nature and epistemology of mathematics is understood, we can understand better why experience cannot revise logic and mathematics.