I agree with you. For what it's worth, I'm a mathematician, and for me math is as much about subjective anticipation as everything else (though most of my colleagues disagree). It's about expecting the same conclusion every time, and expecting to find something familiar that I'd classify as an "error" when that doesn't happen.

With really abstract math, when I believe that theorem X is true, what I'm thinking is more like thought pattern S can reliably transform thought A into thought B, where thought pattern S is a pattern people usually call "deduction", and "A" and "B" are thought types usually called "hypotheses" and "conclusions".