How to think about informal proofs

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of the following article: Brendan Larvor, ‘How to think about informal proofs’, Synthese, Vol. 187(2): 715-730, first published online 9 September 2011. The final publication is available at Springer via doi:10.1007/s11229-011-0007-5It is argued in this study that (i) progress in the philosophy of mathematical practice requires a general positive account of informal proof; (ii) the best candidate is to think of informal proofs as arguments that depend on their matter as well as their logical form; (iii) articulating the dependency of informal inferences on their content requires a redefinition of logic as the general study of inferential actions; (iv) it is a decisive advantage of this conception of logic that it accommodates the many mathematical proofs that include actions on objects other than propositions; (v) this conception of logic permits the articulation of project-sized tasks for the philosophy of mathematical practice, thereby supplying a partial characterisation of normal research in the fieldPeer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

Formalisme, formalisation, intuition et compr\ue9hension en math\ue9matiques : de la pratique informelle aux syst\ue8mes formels et retour \ubb (\uab FFIUM \ubb)

"Ce projet cherche \ue0 comprendre l'interaction dynamique entre les th\ue9ories math\ue9matiques informelles et leur formalisation. Le terme ambigu\ueb \uab formalisation \ubb est au centre du projet." (dal progetto ufficiale