Natures of Proof, Pacific APA, San Francisco, April 2023

I am a commentator at the Pacific APA 2023 conference in San Francisco in a Book Symposium session focused on the book of Catarina Duthil Novaes, The Dialogical Roots of Deduction.

I think very highly of Novaes’s book (my book review is here) and I nominated it for the Lakatos prize, which I am very glad to say that she won. This is particularly appropriate in my view in light of Lakatos’s own use of dialogues in expressing his perspectives on the philosophy of mathematics and the nature of proof.

I shall be a speaker at the book symposium, intending to place the dialogical perspective on proof in the context of a variety of other views of proof. I shall conclude with a few criticisms of the book, which I hope might lead to interesting discussion.

My remarks will follow this outline: