Gentler structuralisms about mathematics

According to some standard structuralist accounts, a mathematical claim like that there are infinitely many primes, is equivalent to a claim like:

1. Necessarily, for any physical structure that satisfies the axioms A₁,...,A_n, the structure satisfies the claim that there are infinitely many primes.

There are two main motivations for structuralism. The first motivation is anti-Platonic animus. The second is worries about uniqueness: if there are abstract objects, there are many candidates for, say, the natural numbers, and it would be arbitrary if our mathematical language were to succeed in picking out on particular family of candidates.

The difficulty with this sort of structuralism is that while it may be fine for a good deal of "ordinary mathematics", such as real analysis, finite-dimensional geometry, dealing with prime numbers, etc., it is not clear that there are enough possible physical structures to model the axioms of such systems as transfinite arithmetic. And if there aren't, then antecedents in claims like (1) will be false, and hence the necessary conditional will hold trivially. One could bring in counterpossibles but that would be explaining the obscure with the obscurer.

I want to drop the requirement that the structures we're talking about are physical structures. Thus, instead of (1), we should say:

2. Necessarily, for any structure that satisfies the axioms A₁,...,A_n, the structure satisfies the claim that there are infinitely many primes.

If we do this, we no longer have a physicalist reduction. But that's fine if our motive for structuralism is worries about arbitrariness rather than worries about abstracta.

Next, restrict the theory to being about what modern mathematics typically means by its mathematical claims. If we do this, the claim becomes logically compatible with Platonism about numbers. Let us suppose that there really are numbers, and our ordinary language gets at them. Nonetheless, I submit, when a modern number theorist is saying that there are infinitely many primes, she is likely not making a claim specifically about them. Rather, she is making a claim about every system that satisfies the said axioms. If the natural numbers satisfy the axioms, then her claims have a bearing on the natural numbers, too.

Here is one reason to think that she's saying that. Mathematical practice is centered on getting what generality you can. What mathematician would want to limit a claim to being about the natural numbers, when she could, at no additional cost, be making a claim about every system that satisfies the Peano axioms?

Now, if we go for this gentler structuralism, and allow abstract entities, we can easily generate structures that satisfy all sorts of axioms. For instance, consider plural existential propositions. These are propositions of the form of the proposition that the Fs exist, where "the Fs" directly plurally refers to a particular plurality. We can define a membership relation: x is a member of p if and only if x is said by p to exist. Add an "empty proposition", which can be any other proposition (say, that cats hate dogs) and say that nothing is its member. Then plural existential propositions, plus the empty proposition, with this membership relations should satisfy the axioms of a plausible set theory with ur-elements. If all one wants is Peano axioms, we can take them to be satisfied by the sequence of propositions that there are no cats, that there is a unique cat, that there are distinct cats x and y and every cat is x or is y, that there are distinct cats x and y and z and every cat is x or is y or is z, and so on.

I am not completely convinced that this sociological thesis about modern mathematics is correct. Maybe I can retreat to the claim that this is what modern mathematics ought to claim.