Is There a Problem about Deviant Encodings?

Juliette Kennedy’s new book reminds us that some have claimed that the existence of so-called deviant encodings or numeral systems raises doubts about the wide acceptance of “Church’s thesis” understood as the identification of computability with recursiveness for numerical functions. It is argued that if responses to such doubts, by Stewart Shapiro and others, in the literature do not already suffice to dispel such doubts, attention to careful discussions, by Charles Parsons and others, of ontological issues in philosophy of mathematics should be more than enough to do so.