No, that's got nothing to do with it. I'm trying to establish a philosophical ground rule before going to the next step. I never imagined it would be this difficult.
The sole question at hand, all I'm asking for agreement on, is that a fact exists independent of a person confirming that fact. Whether anyone confirms a true fact, it's still true in and of itself.
2 + 2 does equal 4, even if nobody knew how to add. That's all. It shouldn't be this hard to agree on something so basic.
But suppose that someone claims to have very large values of 2, then what do you do? Eh? Eh?
You adders can’t answer that, can you?
Okay, then see my next post.
It does, but it can be proved, even without counting, and you can't even ask the question unless you know what "+" means. That must be defined. I've done the proof, although I'm not sure I could do it cold, today. That was in 1975, when I was in a "Foundations of mathematics" class with a bunch of education students. I had fun, they suffered from badly blown minds. :) My wife had taken a similar class a few years earlier, at a different school. She liked hers too, and she was an education student at the time, and is now Chair of a Teacher Education department at a small college. Needless to say, she teaches the "Teaching Mathematics" courses. And makes her students like it too. She's good, very good.