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by empath75 3261 days ago
I'm not sure why you're excluding the possibility of both. Math is largely based on reason, and I think most empiricists believe that mathematicians have knowledge not based on sense experience.
2 comments

>most empiricists believe that mathematicians have knowledge not based on sense experience.

Even the knowledge that 1+1=2 comes from sensing objects in the world. If you'd never seen more than 1 thing ever you would have no sense experience to base your conceptual framework of addition on.

All knowledge -mathematical or otherwise- can be traced back to sense experience. Your ability to reason mathematically comes from your experience of the world and from your experience of your own thoughts. Intuition is fundamentally a sensory experience.

that is what Kant argued regarding the synthetic priori . You cannot know the thing-in-itself.