Abstract

One of the primary goals of mathematicians is to establish new mathematical truths. Toward this end, mathematicians are almost invariably theorem provers. However, there are several methods other than writing down a proof which seem to achieve this epistemic goal of establishing mathematical truths. For instance, Michael Rabin describes a probabilistic test for primality which establishes to an arbitrarily high degree of certainty that a number is prime. Nevertheless, the vast majority of mathematicians are unwilling to employ such probabilistic methods in their attempts to establish new mathematical truths. I argue that mathematicians do not have good grounds for this rejection of probabilistic methods