Believing the Axioms. I Penelope Maddy The Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 53, No. 2. (Jun., 1988), pp. 481-511. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0022-4812%28198806%2953%3A2%3C481%3ABTAI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3 The Journal of Symbolic Logic is currently published by Association for Symbolic Logic. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/asl.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Tue Apr 3 15:14:09 2007 THEJOURNALOF SYMBOLICLOGIC Volume 53, Number 2, June 1988 BELIEVING THE AXIOMS. I PENELOPE MADDY Nothing venture, nothing win, Blood is thick, but water's thin. -Gilbert & Sullivan $0. Introduction. Ask a beginning philosophy of mathematics student why we believe the theorems of mathematics and you are likely to hear, "because we have proofs!" The more sophisticated might add that those proofs are based on true axioms, and that our rules of inference preserve truth.