[webnrrd2k]

> It would probably be best to do away with the term "mathematical truth" altogether. It's confusing and sloppy. Mathematics has no separate truth from the physical world - it's just a field of epistemological methods. This sounds like a contradiction -- epistemology is, more-or-less concerned with what's true. If mathematics is simply a field of epistemology (with is own methods), then it's not a stretch to say that there is a mathematical truth -- a truth that satisfies the methods of the filed of mathematics.

> The simple fact is that mathematics is derived from nature first by observation of countable entities and then a process of abstraction from those observations.

I think it's more complex than that... I suspect that math (and many other fields) starts out this way, going from concrete to abstract, but once it gets to the abstraction phase then it takes on a life of it's own. People find the abstractions interesting in their own right, they seem to develop a sort of historical direction, and they have compelling properties on their own merit, so people felt compelled to develop them. People's intuitions, however, are strongly shaped by physical reality. And those mathematical abstractions are often useful for modeling physical reality, causing a strong interplay between reality and mathematical abstractions.