These are situations where I woud like to give a specific question to the philosopher. In this case it would be: “Is being a prime number a property of number five, or is it just that we decided to use it as a prime number?”
I honestly have no idea how he’d answer, but here’s one guess. Maybe we could tie prime numbers to one of a number of processes for determining primeness. We could observe that those processes always return true for 5, so in a sense primeness is a property of five.
These are situations where I woud like to give a specific question to the philosopher. In this case it would be: “Is being a prime number a property of number five, or is it just that we decided to use it as a prime number?”
I honestly have no idea how he’d answer, but here’s one guess. Maybe we could tie prime numbers to one of a number of processes for determining primeness. We could observe that those processes always return true for 5, so in a sense primeness is a property of five.