  Secondly, naturalist-platonists run a standard Quinean line by construing any challenge to the reliability of our beliefs about platonic mathematical objects as a general challenge to the scientific method's reliability. (This is from the point of view of the scientific naturalist; the scientific-cum-mathematical naturalist can run the same line with corresponding adjustments.) However, by our best lights—according to our best theory of the world, i.e., natural science, which posits abstract mathematical objects—belief in abstract mathematical entities is arrived at by a reliable method, namely the scientific method. This is not simply self-vindication, since the scientific method is here being used to explain the reliability of mathematical beliefs, albeit holistically. But of course if the reliability of the scientific method itself is put into question, the naturalist has no choice but to use the scientific method itself to explain its own reliability. The naturalist-platonist may add that we can do no better, and that anyone who questions the scientific method's reliability has thereby abandoned the naturalist camp. From this perspective, then, there is no epistemological problem for platonism once it is settled that platonist mathematics is part of best science.