Introduction

Victorian England witnessed a reconception of mathematics as a formal rather than a referential practice—as a means for describing relationships rather than quantities. The value of a mathematical claim lay not in its capacity to describe the world but its internal coherence. Victorian mathematics thus contributed to the development of liberal capitalism by justifying abstraction: liberals proclaimed that formal consistency was the foundation of a rational, equitable order, and marginalist economists insisted that value was not inherent but relational, and made economics a branch of mathematics. Marx, meanwhile, profited from the insights of mathematical formalism even as he resisted its mystification. In its privileging of formal relationships Victorian mathematics redefined all fields around it, even redefining Kantian formalism such that mathematics and art came to share the same virtues: they couldn’t claim to offer truths about the world itself but they insisted that they told a deeper, formal truth.

When names fail: Referential practice in face-to-face service encounters

ABSTRACTReferential practice – the variety of ways in and through which speakers refer to things in social interaction – involves a range of very different methods. When referring to physical objects or processes in face-to-face interaction, people may choose from a variety of resources, including verbal categories, names, pointing, verbal descriptors, depictive gestures, and prop demonstrations. This raises the question: Under what circumstances do speakers choose particular resources over others? To address this question, this study examines referential practice in a particular kind of face-to-face workplace setting, the service counter of a quick print shop. At the service counter, not only do customers use alternative resources in referring to the document services they want, but these resources appear to be ordered relative to one another in terms of a preference for minimization. In referring to document services, customers first try the most minimal form, the official name, but if that fails or is unknown, customers fall back on more expanded forms of reference, such as pointing or depicting.