Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 3, Page 602-620, July 2022.

The 34 commentaries on the target article span a broad range of interesting issues. I have organized my reply around five major themes that seemed to emerge: Remarks about the generalizability of the empirical findings, links with other models, necessary extensions, the utility of dual-process models, and more specific points. This allows me to clarify possible misconceptions and identify avenues for further advancement.

Argumentation has remained under-researched in studies analyzing academic journal publications despite its importance in academic writing. This paper reports a study in which we investigated stereotypical argumentative trends, lexico-grammatical features, and interactional metadiscourse markers in 354 research article free-standing discussion sections from the journal of ESP over forty years. The field of ESP was chosen because of its maturity, which has given substance to a dynamic ground for arguments. We drew on the pragma-dialectical approach to analyzing argumentations in the corpus. (...) Findings indicated that due to the argumentative nature of the discussion section, certain argumentative trends recurred more often. The analysis of the lexico-grammatical features and metadiscourse markers of the standpoints also showed patterns of variability over time. The study concludes that it is imperative to incorporate relevant facets from various argumentation models to construct a comprehensive argumentation theory and gain deeper insights into argumentation in academic writing. (shrink)

This thesis studies the role of conceptual content in inference and reasoning. The first two chapters offer a theoretical and historical overview of the relation between inference and meaning in philosophy and psychology. In particular, a critical analysis of the formality thesis, i.e., the idea that rational inference is a rule-based and topic-neutral mechanism, is advanced. The origins of this idea in logic and its influence in philosophy and cognitive psychology are discussed. Chapter 3 consists of an analysis of the (...) relationship between inference and representation. It is argued that inference has to be studied from a pluralistic per- spective due to its dependence on different formats of representing information. The following four chapters apply conceptual spaces, a formal theory of concepts within cognitive semantics, to three concept-based inference-types. First, an explication of Sellars notion of material inference is advanced. Later, the model is extended to account for nonmonotonic inference by studying the role expectations in reasoning. Finally, a conceptual space-model of category-based induction is presented. This model predicts most of the empirical properties of this psychological phenomenon and subsumes some of the previous theories in psychology. It is stated that the explanatory fruitfulness of this new approach is evidence for the failure of the formality thesis and calls for a unified model of rational inference that puts semantics at center stage. The last chapter of the thesis discusses how inference and concepts interact in scientific reasoning, which makes constant use of hybrid symbolic structures for representing conceptual information. Stephen Toulmin’s notions of method of representation and inferential technique are developed and applied in a case study about the emergence of the notion of instantaneous speed during the passage from geometrical physics to analytical mechanics. It is claimed that this analysis provides support to the pluralistic perspective for theorizing about reasoning. (shrink)