Philosophy Logicism Intuitionism Formalism Reason

Intuitionism, school of mathematical thought introduced by the 20th-century Dutch mathematician
L.E.J. Brouwer that contends the primary objects of mathematical discourse are mental constructions
governed by self-evident laws. Intuitionists have challenged many of the oldest principles of
mathematics as being nonconstructive and hence mathematically meaningless. Compare formalism;
logicism.
During the first half of the 20th century, the philosophy of mathematics was dominated by three
views: logicism, intuitionism, and formalism. Given this, it might seem odd that none of these
views has been mentioned yet. The reason is that (with the exception of certain varieties of
formalism) these views are not views of the kind discussed above. The views discussed above
concern what the sentences of mathematics are really saying and what they are really about. But
logicism and intuitionism are not views of this kind at all, and insofar as certain versions of
formalism are views of this kind, they are versions of the views described above. How then
should logicism, intuitionism, and formalism be characterized? In order to understand these
views, it is important to understand the intellectual climate in which they were developed.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics
became preoccupied with the idea of securing a firm foundation of mathematics. That is, they
wanted to show that mathematics, as ordinarily practiced, was reliable or trustworthy or certain.
It was in connection with this project that logicism, intuitionism, and formalism were developed.
The desire to secure a foundation for mathematics was brought on in large part by the British
philosopher Bertrand Russell’s discovery in 1901 that naive set theory contained a contradiction.
It had been naively thought that for every concept, there exists a set of things that fall under that
concept; for instance, corresponding to the concept “egg” is the set of all the eggs in the world.
Even concepts such as “mermaid” are associated with a set—namely, the empty set. Russell
noticed, however, that there is no set corresponding to the concept “not a member of itself.” For
suppose that there were such a set—i.e., a set of all the sets that are not members of themselves.
Call this set S. Is S a member of itself? If it is, then it is not (because all the sets in S are not
members of themselves); and if S is not a member of itself, then it is (because all the sets not in S
are members of themselves). Either way, a contradiction follows. Thus, there is no such set as S.
Logicism is the view that mathematical truths are ultimately logical truths. This idea was
introduced by Frege. He endorsed logicism in conjunction with Platonism, but logicism is
consistent with various anti-Platonist views as well. Logicism was also endorsed at about the
same time by Russell and his associate, British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Few people
still endorse this view, although there is a neologicist school, the main proponents of which are
the British philosophers Crispin Wright and Robert Hale.
https://www.britannica.com/science/philosophy-of-mathematics/Logicism-intuitionism-and-formalism
Mathematics is a study which, when we start from its most familiar portions, may be pursued
in either of two opposite directions. The more familiar direction is constructive, towards
gradually increasing complexity: from integers to fractions, real numbers, complex numbers;
from addition and multiplication to differen- tiation and integration, and on to higher
mathematics. The other direction, which is less familiar, proceeds, by analysing, to greater
and greater abstractness and logical simplicity; instead of asking what can be defined and
deduced from what is as- sumed to begin with, we ask instead what more general ideas and
principles can be found, in terms of which what was our starting-point can be defined or
deduced. It is the fact of pursuing this opposite direction that characterizes mathematical
philosophy as opposed to ordinary mathematics. But it should be understood that the
distinction is one, not in the subject matter, but in the state of mind of the investigator. Early
Greek geometers, passing from the empirical rules of Egyptian
land-surveying to the general propositions by which those rules were found to be justifiable,
and thence to Euclid’s axioms and postulates, were engaged in mathematical philosophy,
according to the above definition; but when once the axioms and postulates had been
reached, their deductive employment, as we find it in Eu- clid, belonged to mathematics in
the ordinary sense. The distinction between mathematics and mathematical philosophy is
one which depends upon the interest inspiring the research, and upon the stage which the
research has reached; not upon the propositions with which the research is concerned. We
may state the same distinction in another way. The most obvious and easy things in
mathematics are not those that come logically at the beginning; they are things that, from the
point of view of logical deduction, come somewhere in the middle. Just as the easiest bodies
to see are those that are neither very near nor very far, neither very small nor very great, so
the easiest conceptions to grasp are those that are neither very complex nor very simple
(using “simple” in a logical “successor” as terms of which we know the meaning although we
cannot define them, we might let them stand for any three terms that verify Peano’s five
axioms. They will then no longer be terms which have a meaning that is definite though
undefined: they will be “variables,” terms concerning which we make certain hy- potheses,
namely, those stated in the five axioms, but which are otherwise undeter- mined. If we adopt
this plan, our theorems will not be proved concerning an ascer- tained set of terms called
“the natural numbers,” but concerning all sets of terms having certain properties. Such a
procedure is not fallacious; indeed for certain purposes it represents a valuable
generalization. But from two points of view it fails to give an adequate basis for arithmetic. In
the first place, it does not enable us to know whether there are any sets of terms verifying
Peano’s axioms; it does not even give the faintest suggestion of any way of discovering
whether there are such sets. In the second place, as already observed, we want our numbers
to be such as can be used for counting common objects, and this requires that our numbers
should
have a definite meaning, not merely that they should have certain formal properties. This
definite meaning is defined by the logical theory of arithmetic
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intuitionism/

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Intuitionism, school of mathematical thought introduced by the 20th-century Dutch mathematician

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