Abstract
In this, concluding, chapter, I suggest a number of ways in which the view of logic suggested here can be broadly considered in relation to other theories of reasoning.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
As Magnani points out, in this, and in many senses, the project of naturalisation is co-extensive with recent approaches to artificial intelligence that take a “bottom-up” approach in contrast to traditional symbol-processing approaches (e.g. [7]). This is discussed further in note 24.
- 2.
I will not take issue with this characterisation of the “lawlike” nature of cognitive science, though it is worth flagging up the difficulties in characterising cognitive science in these terms, and science more generally. For a recent discussion of related issues, see [8].
- 3.
See the discussion in [6].
- 4.
One response to this that we have not really mentioned so far is to say that logic is, to some extent, sui generis. This is perhaps most clear in the “universal logic” project begun by Jean-Yves Beziau, amongst others. This project is of clear mathematical interest, but it often does not have any clear articulation of the relationship between this technical study of the machinery of logic and the use of logic. Somewhat polemically, Woods [2] argues that the: ‘factor of good-for recedes into the background, and technological self-study becomes sui generis, and withal the route to the upper elechons of academic achievement and repute.’.
- 5.
Magnani suggests that this also gains support from Gabbay and Wood’s [9] discussion of abductive reasoning where: ‘they indeed stress the function of consciousness and indicate both its narrow bandwidth and its slow processing of information, an extraordinary quantity of information processed by the human system cannot be accessed by consciousness’ (p. 18). It is often suggested, for example, that it is inherent in the structure of the construction of consciousness that vast swathes of information are suppressed.
- 6.
See [6, p. 19].
- 7.
Also: ‘Traditionally, fallacies are considered mistakes that appear to be errors, attractive and seductive, but also universal, because humans are prone to committing them’ [6, p. 21].
- 8.
An additional issue for the collapse of the normative into the natural is, as argued for at length in the work of Wilfrid Sellars ([10], e.g.), it is far more difficult to extricate one from the other than it may seem. For example, Sellars’ arguments regarding the theory-ladeness of experience clarify the way in which even basic empirical data is bound up with normative theoretical articulations. Pursuing this line of thought, Sellars’ arguments may also be used to motivate an objection against the naturalisation project that follows a similar structure to arguments from circularity discussed in the introductory chapter and Chap. 1. Even identifying “patterns” of reasoning from empirical data presupposes some form of theory-laden, and typically normative, framework. This kind of argument in relation to the naturalisation of epistemology is explored in detail in [11]. In addition, as explored in [12], James O’Shea discusses Sellars’ arguments (sympathetically) that: ‘the normative dimensions of human conceptual cognition are not only consistent with, but in fact stand in intelligible systematic interrelations with an underlying naturalistic dimension of language / world or mind / world representational relations’ (p. 152).
- 9.
Keith Stanovich [14] recognizes that there may be non-classical norms, but there is little work in the literature on non-standard normative theories.
- 10.
I discuss this further below.
- 11.
In [13], we argued that this is due to the automatic sub-activation of the association between tokens of the terms “roses” and “living things”.
- 12.
- 13.
A similar norm is discussed in detail in [21, p. 136ff], though the norms for dialogue discussed there go far beyond those suggested here.
- 14.
That this is a norm, rather than an empirical description, is clear from the fact that many discourses are ideologically loaded, and weighted in favour of a single agent, or group of agents, as discussed in Chap. 3.
- 15.
This bears some resemblance to the Spinozan conception of freedom in relation to constraints, discussed in (e.g. [23]).
- 16.
This is a view that has an affinity with Brandom’s argument that ‘there is never any final answer to what is correct’ [25, p. 647].
- 17.
As pointed out in [26], there is an odd tension between Brandom’s account of intersubjectivity as “I-thou” rather than “I-we” (e.g. [25], p. 39), and the argument that the assessment of a community should be taken as correct: ‘[the] community’s all-inclusive practical assessment cannot be mistaken’ [25, p. 54].
- 18.
In [22, pp. 89–90], Laden points to Stanley Cavell’s work on reason, in which utterances are taken to be act-like, and their meaning is dependent upon the aims of these acts, though these aims may be unobvious even as the acts are made.
- 19.
Perhaps the most well-known account in which meaning is not dependent upon intentions is found in the work of Ruth Millikan, who argues that ordinary understanding also involves causal processes in the context of evolutionary functioning (e.g. [28]).
- 20.
Pezzulo [30] also discusses (often subpersonal) “coordination tools” which, he argues, help to explain the ease by which interactions occur.
- 21.
- 22.
Note, however, that Magnani does make some steps in this direction. For example: ‘[M]inds are extended and artificial in themselves. In this perspective logical and mathematical systems are the creative fruit of the interplay between internal and external representations and, once available, they represent an external materiality that plays a specific role in the interplay due to the fact that it (external materiality) exhibits (and operates through) its own cognitive constraints’ [6, p. 18].
- 23.
Gallagher and Miyahara [32] define strong interation as: ‘a mutually engaged co-regulated coupling between at least two autonomous agents where the co-regulation and the coupling mutually affect each other, constituting a self-sustaining organization in the domain of relational dynamics’.
- 24.
- 25.
Seibt suggests that this kind of understanding is a kind of “half-way house” between no meaning whatsoever, and full propositional content, and which is something that we are ‘perfectly familiar with a kind of conscious cognitive processing that is neither a clear-cut instance of propositional knowledge nor a practical skill (knowing-how)’ [31, p. 95].
- 26.
This also has consequences for how we might approach reasoning in artificial processes. It seems to me that the connection that we are making here between sub-personal interaction, and linguistic interaction, may also find analogy with attempts to synthesise symbol-processing approaches to artificial intelligence with heuristic and dynamical approaches (on the latter, see [37, 38]). In this vein, Iizuka and Di Paolo [39] draw upon evolutionary robotics’ approaches to argue that determining social relations can be generated from the dynamics of processes of interaction, such that artificial agents are capable of determining whether or not they are interacting with interactive or non-interactive (recorded) agents. They argue that this kind of capacity is not something that can simply be “built-into” a single, autonomous, agent, and also that successful interactions are dependent upon emergent properties of the coupling relationships between agents.
- 27.
See Oksala [43] for extended discussion of Foucault’s account of freedom.
- 28.
This is also related to the classical distinction, traceable to Kant, between positive and negative freedom, discussed in detail in [44].
- 29.
See [20] for discussion of related issues in the context of future-oriented forms of contemporary politics.
- 30.
Of course, not all interactions are, or perhaps can be coherent, due to these latter constraints, which often, we may assume ensure that there is a relationship of asymmetry between certain agents. But, equally, strategies by which it may become possible to engage in processes of interaction that are symmetric between agents are part-and-parcel with the process by which interactions may occur in the first place.
- 31.
See, for example, (e.g. [22], p. 60).
- 32.
Consider the following, fairly prosaic, example. One morning, after waking, I walked upstairs and started to watch a television programme called “Saturday Kitchen”, which is a regular weekly cookery show in the United Kingdom, and whose long-time presenter had recently left the series. A while later, I heard my partner waking, and as she began to ascend the stairs, she uttered “he’s not as good as the old one”. This, radically contextual, utterance, was clear from inside the space of interaction between myself and my partner, and, as is clear, the utterance can not be what began, or constructed, that space. Rather, it seems much more viable to say that the space was already in place, through sub-personal, and conscious, perception and awareness of my partner, the environmental context, and so on. The utterance, was much more a marker that we might engage in reasoning regarding the appraisal of the presenter in relation to the one who had left the week prior.
References
John Woods. Paradox and Paraconsistency: Conflict Resolution in the Abstract Sciences. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
John Woods. Advice on the logic of argument. Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso, (1):7–34, 2013.
John Woods. Errors of reasoning: Naturalizing the logic of inference. College Publ., 2013.
Lorenzo Magnani. Abductive cognition: The epistemological and eco-cognitive dimensions of hypothetical reasoning, volume 3. Springer Science & Business Media, 2009.
Lorenzo Magnani. The eco-cognitive model of abduction. Journal of Applied Logic, 13(3):285–315, 2015.
Lorenzo Magnani. Naturalizing logic: Errors of reasoning vindicated: Logic reapproaches cognitive science. Journal of Applied Logic, 13(1):13–36, 2015.
Rodney A Brooks. Achieving artificial intelligence through building robots. Technical report, DTIC Document, 1986.
James Ladyman. Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford University Press, 2007.
Dov Gabbay and John Woods. Advice on abductive logic. Logic Journal of the Igpl, 14(2):189–219, 2006.
Wilfrid Sellars et al. Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science, 1(19):253–329, 1956.
James O’shea. Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a normative turn, volume 6. Polity, 2007.
James O’Shea. Prospects for a stereoscopic vision of our thinking nature: On sellars, brandom, and millikan. Humana Mente Journal of Philosophical Studies, 21:149–172, 2012.
J. Trafford and A. Tillas. Intuition and reason: Re-assessing dual-process theories of cognition. Teorema: Revista internacional de filosofía, XXXIV(3), 2015.
Keith E Stanovich. Who is rational?: Studies of individual differences in reasoning. Psychology Press, 1999.
Jonathan Evans. Bias in human reasoning: Causes and consequences. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc, 1989.
Walter C Sá, Richard F West, and Keith E Stanovich. The domain specificity and generality of belief bias: Searching for a generalizable critical thinking skill. Journal of educational psychology, 91(3):497, 1999.
Catarina Dutilh Novaes. Formal Languages in Logic: A Philosophical and Cognitive Analysis. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Deborah K. Heikes. Rationality and Feminist Philosophy. Continuum, 2010.
William C. Wimsatt. Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: Piecewise Approximations to Reality. Harvard University Press, 2007.
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Verso Books, 2015.
Frans H. Van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst. A Systematic Theory of Argumentation: The Pragma-Dialectical Approach. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Anthony Simon Laden. Reasoning: a social picture. Oxford University Press, 2012.
Matthew J. Kisner. Spinoza on Human Freedom: Reason, Autonomy and the Good Life. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Stephen Edelston Toulmin. Knowing and Acting: An Invitation to Philosophy. Macmillan, 1976.
Robert Brandom. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Harvard University Press, 1994.
Thomas Fossen. Politicizing brandom’s pragmatism: Normativity and the agonal character of social practice. European Journal of Philosophy, 20(4):371–395, 2012.
Anthony Simon Laden. Reasonably radical: Deliberative liberalism and the politics of identity. Cambridge Univ Press, 2001.
Ruth G. Millikan. Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories. MIT Press, 1984.
Eleni Gregoromichelaki and Ruth Kempson. Grammars as processes for interactive language use: incrementality and the emergence of joint intentionality. In Perspectives on linguistic pragmatics, pages 185–216. Springer, 2013.
Giovanni Pezzulo. Shared representations as coordination tools for interaction. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2(2):303–333, 2011.
Johanna Seibt. Chapter five. intercultural dialogue and the processing of significance: Cognition as orientation. In Jesper Garsdal and Johanna Seibt, editors, How is Global Dialogue Possible?: Foundational Reseach on Value Conflicts and Perspectives for Global Policy, pages 85–116. De Gruyter, 2014.
Shaun Gallagher and Katsunori Miyahara. Neo-pragmatism and enactive intentionality. In Jay Schulkin, editor, New Directions in Philosophy and Cognitive Science: Adaptation and Cephalic Expression. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Hanne de Jaegher, Ezequiel di Paolo, and Shaun Gallagher. Can social interaction constitute social cognition? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(10):441–447, 2010.
Shaun Gallagher. The practice of mind: Theory, simulation or primary interaction? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(5-7):83–108, 2001.
Matthew Ratcliffe. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Immanuel Kant. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Randall D. Beer. Computational and dynamical languages for autonomous agents. In Tim van Gelder and Robert Port, editors, Mind as Motion: Explorations in the Dynamics of Cognition, pages 121–147. MIT Press, 1995.
Randall D. Beer. Dynamical approaches to cognitive science. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4(3):91–99, 2000.
Hiroyuki Iizuka and Ezequiel Di Paolo. Minimal agency detection of embodied agents. In Advances in Artificial Life, pages 485–494. Springer, 2007.
Rudolf Carnap. The Logical Syntax of Language. London, K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1937.
Martin Buber. I and Thou. Scribner, New York, 1970.
Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish. Vintage Books, 1977.
Johanna Oksala. Foucault on Freedom. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Isaiah Berlin. Two concepts of liberty: an inaugural lecture delivered before the university of Oxford on 31 october 1958. Clarendon, 1959.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Trafford, J. (2017). Naturalization, Normativity, and Ethics. In: Meaning in Dialogue. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47205-8_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47205-8_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47204-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47205-8
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)