RUME 25
2023
Omaha, Nebraska
Proving as cooperative communication: Using Grice’s maxims and implicature to understand proof comprehension in undergraduate mathematics education
Page: 815
In this exploratory theoretical analysis, we apply Grice’s maxims for cooperative communication to make sense of the ways that proofs are written and understood. We argue that proving can sometimes be productively viewed as a form of cooperative communication. Grice’s maxims place expectations on the prover and provide norms for how proofs should be written. The reader’s expectation that the prover is adhering to these norms allow for the possibility of implicature—that is, the prover can imply statements to the reader that are neither explicitly said nor logically necessary. We use this analysis to better understand the practice of proving and to suggest a future line of empirical research.