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POSTPONED: NOW TAKING PLACE JULY 12TH, 2021, 5PM (BST), ZOOM CHANNEL 1 (Registration)

The symposium Mathematics and the dialogue is part of the Joint BSHM – CSHPM/SCHPM Conference People, Places, Practices to be held from July 12th-15th, 2021, at the University of St Andrews, Scotland online. We are very grateful for the support of the International Commission on the History of Mathematics (ICHM).

The aim of the symposium is to survey and evaluate various forms of dialogical argument in the practice and the philosophy of mathematics. We consider the dialogue as a tool to learn about mathematical practices, and as a philosophical concept to model mathematical practices. Mathematicians and philosophers of mathematics alike make use of dialogical forms of argument in contexts of both scientific discovery and scientific justification, especially pertaining to foundational issues such as the justification of axioms. Each of the three talks assembled in the symposium address genuinely dialogical strategies of mathematical reasoning and inquiry from a different point of view. While the first talk reconstructs the way in which Aristotle appeals to the Socratic dialogue to examine and refute putative mathematical definitions, the second talk presents a method of interviewing contemporary mathematicians about their respective meta-mathematical background assumptions. The third talk discusses dialogical aspects of rigor judgments in mathematical practice.