IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-031-40846-5_85.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Rhetorical Approaches to the Study of Mathematical Practice

In: Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice

Author

Listed:
  • G. Mitchell Reyes

    (Lewis & Clark College)

Abstract

What does rhetoric, the study of argument and persuasion, have to do with mathematics, the study of patterns of relations (in number, geometry, topology, …) and their necessary entailments? The following chapter explores a growing body of research that seeks to address this question – scholarship that pursues the counterintuitive idea that rhetoric and mathematics might just have more to do with each other than we have been taught to believe. It argues that many of the seeds for contemporary study of rhetoric and mathematics emerge from Imre Lakatos’s tour de force, Proofs and Refutations. There we find a rejection of mathematical formalism and the telos of absolute truth, an emphasis on the arts of mathematical practice, and a model of informal mathematics that positions rhetorical argument as an engine of mathematical innovation. The book thus opens the way, however unintentionally, for understanding informal mathematics as intimately intertwined with rhetorical practice. The chapter concludes with discussion of how contemporary scholars have built upon Lakatos’s work and, in recent years, expanded beyond it.

Suggested Citation

  • G. Mitchell Reyes, 2024. "Rhetorical Approaches to the Study of Mathematical Practice," Springer Books, in: Bharath Sriraman (ed.), Handbook of the History and Philosophy of Mathematical Practice, pages 2689-2709, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-40846-5_85
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-40846-5_85
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-031-40846-5_85. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.