In The Enigma of Reason, Mercier and Sperber (M&S) present and defend their interactionist account of reason. In this piece, I discuss briefly the points of agreement between M&S and myself and, more extensively, the points of disagreement, most of which pertain to details of the evolutionary components of their account. I discuss in particular the purported modular nature of reason; their account of myside bias as an optimum/adaptation; and the claim that reason thus construed must be an individual‐level and (...) not a group‐level adaptation. In the final section, I offer brief considerations on an alternative account of reasoning, where the focus is on how sociocultural environments may tune the social production and evaluation of arguments. (shrink)

A range of formal models of human reasoning have been proposed in a number of fields such as philosophy, logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, cognitive science, etc.: various logics, probabilistic systems, belief revision systems, neural networks, among others. Now, it seems reasonable to require that formal models of human reasoning be empirically adequate if they are to be viewed as models of the phenomena in question. How are formal models of human reasoning typically put to empirical test? One way (...) to do so is to isolate a number of key principles of the system, and design experiments to gauge the extent to which participants do or do not follow them in reasoning tasks. Another way is to take relevant existing results and check whether a particular formal model predicts these results. The present investigation provides an illustration of the second kind of empirical testing by comparing two formal models for reasoning – namely the non-monotonic logic known as preferential logic; and a particular version of belief revision theories, screened belief revision – against the reasoning phenomenon known as belief bias in the psychology of reasoning literature: human reasoners typically seek to maintain the beliefs they already hold, and conversely to reject contradicting incoming information. The conclusion of our analysis will be that screened belief revision is more empirically adequate with respect to belief bias than preferential logic and non-monotonic logics in general, as what participants seem to be doing is above all a form of belief management on the basis of background knowledge. The upshot is thus that, while it may offer valuable insights into the nature of human reasoning, preferential logic is ultimately inadequate as a formal model of the phenomena in question. (shrink)

Minimal adversariality consists in the opposition of contradictory conclusions in argumentation, and its usual metaphorical expression as a game between combating arguers has seen it be criticized from a number of perspectives: the language used, whether cooperation best attains the argumentative telos of epistemic betterment, and the ideal nature of the metaphor itself. This paper explores primarily the idealization of deductive argumentation, which is problematic due to its attenuated applicability to a dialectic involving premises and justificatory biases that are left (...) hidden and unelucidated. To clarify the issue and offer up a solution, we consider minimal adversariality as an involuntary state of affairs before relating this interpretation to a link between rational persuasion and the attainment of epistemic betterment. Through this we see how the idealizing tendencies of minimal adversariality can be reduced even in argumentation involving premises whose justifications for any arguer are inaccessible to any other arguer. (shrink)

This book symposium comprises a précis of Nuno Venturinha’s Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology together with four critical commentaries on different aspects of the book by Marcelo Carvalho, João Vergílio Gallerani Cuter, Marcos Silva and Darlei Dall’Agnol, and the author’s replies.

In recent years, substructural approaches to paradoxes have become quite popular. But whatever restrictions on structural rules we may want to enforce, it is highly desirable that such restrictions be accompanied by independent philosophical motivation, not directly related to paradoxes. Indeed, while these recent developments have shed new light on a number of issues pertaining to paradoxes, it seems that we now have even more open questions than before, in particular two very pressing ones: what (independent) motivations do we have (...) (if any) for restrictions on structural rules, and what to make of the plurality of new logics emerging from these restrictions, i.e. how to ‘choose’ among the different options. In this paper, we address these two questions from the perspective of a dialogical conception of logic that we've been advocating in recent years. We will argue that dialogical interpretations of structural rules, that is, as rules determining specific properties of the dialogues in question, provide a conveniently neutral framework to adjudicate between the different substructural proposals that have been made in the literature on paradoxes. (shrink)

This paper argues that adopting a particular dialogical account of logical consequence quite directly gives rise to an interesting form of logical pluralism, the form of pluralism in question arising out of the requirement that deductive proofs be explanatory.

In recent years, the philosophy and psychology of reasoning have made a ‘social turn’: in both disciplines it is now common to reject the traditional picture of reasoning as a solitary intellectual exercise in favour of the idea that reasoning is a social activity driven by social aims. According to the most prominent social account, Mercier and Sperber’s interactionist theory, this implies that reasoning is not a normative activity. As they argue, in producing reasons we are not trying to ‘get (...) things right’; instead our aims are to justify ourselves and persuade others to accept our views. I will argue that even if interactionism has played a crucial role in bringing about the ‘social turn’ in our thinking about reasoning, it does not convince in its claim that reasoning is not a normative activity. Moreover, I argue that it is in fact perfectly possible to understand reasoning as a social tool that is also aimed at getting things right. I will propose that Gilbert Ryle’s conceptualization of reasoning as ‘didactic discourse’ offers one possible way to understand reasoning as both social and normative activity, and that as such his ideas could be of great value for the social turn in our thinking about reasoning. (shrink)

Realism has been a central object of attention among analytical philosophers for some decades. Starting from analytical philosophy, the return of realism has spread into other contemporary philosophical traditions and given birth to new trends in current discussions, as for example in the debates about “new realism.” Discussions about realism focused on linguistic meaning, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action and ethics. The implications for politics of discussion about realism in action theory and in ethics, however, are not much discussed.