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View submission: Axioms and Postulates as Speech Acts
In one sense all language-usage is trivially a speech act because communication is a kind of act. But the term speech act usually refers to “something more than” communication, like entering a contract or a legal relationship. Axioms are part of a formal system which expresses propositions, and so is a speech act in the trivial sense but it’s hard to see how there’s the “something more” required for an act. Some of this depends on your view of the metaphysics and ontology of mathematical objects, but I don’t think that we “create” math by defining it in a formal system. We’re really just discovering a structure that already exists.
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