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The Judicial Analogy for Mathematical Publication

  • Conference paper
Research in History and Philosophy of Mathematics

Abstract

Having criticized the analogies between mathematical proofs and narrative fiction in 2000 and between mathematics and playing abstract games in 2008, I want to put forward an analogy of my own for criticism. It is between how the mathematical community accepts a new result put forward by a mathematician and the proceedings of a law court trying a civil suit leading to a verdict. Because it is only an analogy, I do not attempt to draw any philosophical conclusions from it.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The idea does continually spring up. The evening before my writing this footnote, 20th January, 2015, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and the Mathematical Institute at Oxford held an event called “Narrative and Proof” featuring a panel discussion led off with a paper by Marcus du Sautoy entitled “Proof = Narrative” http://new.livestream.com/oxuni/narrativeandproof.

  2. 2.

    A list of pairs that I see as analogous appears at the end for reference.

  3. 3.

    I am grateful to an anonymous referee for reminding me of this paper, of which I was nominally aware, having reviewed (in a weak sense, “made note of”) the book in which it appears (Thomas 2012).

  4. 4.

    At the end of my presentation it was pointed out to me by Michael Williams that there are those that find pleasure in reading computer code, an activity that seems to me comparable to reading musical scores without hearing the music—actually or virtually.

  5. 5.

    The other comment made to me at the end of my presentation, by someone whose name I did not record, was that a feminist view of testimony explicitly considers the standpoint of the speaker. While in most circumstances this is an important feature of testimony, it does not seem to matter in the mathematical context because what matters is so much the recipe for having the appropriate experience oneself rather than the anything at all to do with the witness.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. St John’s College and Department of Mathematics, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, R3T 2N2

    R. S. D. Thomas

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Correspondence to R. S. D. Thomas .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Mathematical, Information and Computer Sciences, Point Loma Nazarene University, San Diego, California, USA

    Maria Zack

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of California, Davis, DAVIS, California, USA

    Elaine Landry

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Thomas, R.S.D. (2015). The Judicial Analogy for Mathematical Publication. In: Zack, M., Landry, E. (eds) Research in History and Philosophy of Mathematics. Proceedings of the Canadian Society for History and Philosophy of Mathematics/La Société Canadienne d’Histoire et de Philosophie des Mathématiques. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22258-5_12

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