The goal of our project is to develop a new area of study at the intersection of linguistics and the philosophy of mathematics : (what we call) mathematical hygiene. The term is based on the expression verbal hygiene, developed by the linguist Deborah Cameron (1995), to refer to the set of normative ideas that language users have about which linguistic practices should be preferred.
In a parallel manner, we define mathematical hygiene as « the set of normative discourses regulating mathematical practices» (Arana & Burnett, 2023). The project has three main goals :
1) to document mathematical hygiene phenomena, with a particular focus on the history of mathematics,
2) to compare mathematical hygiene and verbal hygiene phenomena synchronically and diachronically,
3) to develop a new understanding of how verbal and mathematical hygiene phenomena arise using insights from the psychology of reasoning.
We believe that studying normative discourses on mathematics in the way that sociolinguists study normative discourses on language will open the door to a better understanding of the diachronic and synchronic relationships between language and mathematics.
