ABSTRACT

Pursuit of the notion of mathematical meaning has dominated much of the discussion to do with the philosophy of mathematics education. The flavour of current discussion generally seems opposed to notions of absolute meaning towards seeing meaning as a socially constructed phenomena. Such a move seems consistent with theoretical shifts in other academic fields but it still retains a tendency towards seeing meaning as in some ways independent of time and context, a notion associated with concepts rather than with conceiving, a fixity to which the learner converges. In particular, any attempt to assign a socially conventional meaning remains problematic since any account of what this might be is mediated by some symbolic system subject to the interpretation of any individual user.