Rhetorics of Rigor

This abstract has open access
Abstract Summary
While historians of science rightly take the importance of quantification for granted, over the course of the modern period the sciences of mathematics and computation have generally become less focused on quantity. Numerical knowledge claims have continued to exert undeniable force in discourses framed by ‘modern science,’ but countervailing tendencies in the sciences of quantity itself have increasingly thrown the primacy of numbers into question, as abstract spaces, axiomatic systems, and algorithmic procedures have largely eclipsed numbers and equations in the work of many mathematicians and related researchers. This panel asks what it meant and what ends it served, within mathematics and without, to locate mathematical rigor separately from the numerical. Attending to steps taken over the past century and a half to decenter quantification, we seek to understand the ways mathematics has been seen as a source of non-quantitative rigor. What sort of argumentative resource is a mathematics without numbers?
Abstract ID :
HSS321
Submission Type
Abstract Topics
Chronological Classification :
20th century, early
Self-Designated Keywords :
Mathematics, Computing, Logic, Quantification, Rhetoric, Disciplines

Associated Sessions

Princeton University
University of Pennsylvania

Abstracts With Same Type

Abstract ID
Abstract Title
Abstract Topic
Submission Type
Primary Author
HSS575
Aspects of Scientific Practice/Organization
Organized Session
Prof. Anna Graber
HSS355
Technology
Organized Session
Francesco Cassata
HSS587
Medicine and Health
Organized Session
Chantal Marazia
HSS872
Thematic Approaches to the Study of Science
Organized Session
Dr. Alison Kraft
HSS5847
Biology
Organized Session
Dr. Dominik Huenniger
HSS512
Aspects of Scientific Practice/Organization
Organized Session
Alrun Schmidtke
86 visits