For this reason AD was never really considered as a serious candidate for a new axiom. The integers Z, of course, are a unique factorization domain, and it turns out that the irreducible elements of Z are exactly the primes. Thus, if viewing numbers as sets had appreciable explanatory value, we should expect number theorists to adopt this vantage point for the sake of exploiting its epistemic and cognitive resources. In spite of the recent surge of interest in various aspects of mathematical explanation2 , philosophers have yet to turn their attention to the explanatory and more broadly epistemological dimensions of intertheoretic reduction in mathematics. Connecting the mathematics community.
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