Daily Inspiration Quote by Abraham Robinson

Robinson is taking a scalpel to a fashionable kind of metaphysical bravado: the idea that mathematics might contain truths forever sealed off from human access. The opening hedge, "As far as I know", reads modest, but it functions as a social map of the discipline. He is reporting what the community will and will not tolerate as a live position, and the phrase "only a small minority" quietly turns "unknowable truths" into an eccentric taste rather than a profound insight.

The key pressure point is his aside: "even of those with Platonist views". Platonists already grant mathematics an objective reality independent of us; if anyone should be comfortable with truths existing beyond proof, it is them. Robinson's point is that most working mathematicians, including many Platonists, still cling to an implicit humanism: mathematical reality is not just "out there", it is also, in principle, navigable. That is less a theorem than a professional ethic. Math is built on the promise that questions can be clarified, methods refined, axioms adjusted, and eventually knowledge expanded. A permanent unknowable remainder threatens the craft's moral economy.

The context matters. After Godel, it became impossible to treat "true but unprovable" as a mere philosophical toy. Robinson, a logician famous for nonstandard analysis, had every reason to take foundational results seriously. The subtext is not denial of incompleteness; it is skepticism toward inflating it into mysticism. He's defending mathematics as a practiced, communal enterprise: not a museum of unreachable facts, but a project whose default posture is that understanding can be earned.