Since nominalist philosophers question whether there are any numbers (on the grounds that, were there to be such things, they would have to be abstract— nonspatiotemporal, acausal, mind- and language-independent—to serve as appropriate truthmakers for the claims of standard mathematics), they see fit to question claims such as “2 + 3 = 5” precisely because they logically imply the existence of objects such as the number 2, which, they take it, may fail to exist (as in our finite domain example) even though the general claim “any two things added to any three further things make five things” is
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