Editing Foundations of mathematics (section)

==== Rough-and-ready realism ====
Few mathematicians are typically concerned on a daily, working basis over logicism, formalism or any other philosophical position. Instead, their primary concern is that the mathematical enterprise as a whole always remains productive. Typically, they see this as ensured by remaining open-minded, practical and busy; as potentially threatened by becoming overly-ideological, fanatically reductionistic or lazy.

Such a view has also been expressed by some well-known physicists.

For example, the Physics Nobel Prize laureate [[Richard Feynman]] said

{{blockquote|People say to me, "Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?" No, I'm not ... If it turns out there is a simple ultimate law which explains everything, so be it&nbsp;– that would be very nice to discover. If it turns out it's like an onion with millions of layers ... then that's the way it is. But either way there's Nature and she's going to come out the way She is. So therefore when we go to investigate we shouldn't predecide what it is we're looking for only to find out more about it.<ref name="fey1">Richard Feynman, ''The Pleasure of Finding Things Out'' p. 23</ref>}}

And [[Steven Weinberg]]:<ref name="weinberg">Steven Weinberg, chapter ''[http://libcom.org/library/unexpected-uselessness-philosophy Against Philosophy]'' wrote, in ''Dreams of a final theory''</ref>

{{blockquote|The insights of philosophers have occasionally benefited physicists, but generally in a negative fashion – by protecting them from the preconceptions of other philosophers. ... without some guidance from our preconceptions one could do nothing at all. It is just that philosophical principles have not generally provided us with the right preconceptions.}}

Weinberg believed that any undecidability in mathematics, such as the continuum hypothesis, could be potentially resolved despite the incompleteness theorem, by finding suitable further axioms to add to set theory.