Cognitive Science and the Future of Rational Criticism

Abstract

Throughout most of the Western intellectual tradition, the evaluation of reasoning has focused on the relations among statements or sentences. To oversimplify only slightly, the strand of the evaluative tradition associated with formal logic has focused on the syntactic relations between premisses and conclusion (and the semantic relation between premisses and the world) as the key to deciding whether a piece of reasoning is sound. Informal logic, as well, though not limiting its purview to the “logical form” exemplified in the relation of premisses to conclusion, has for the most part attended to reasoning insofar as it is linguistically encoded in arguments.¹ Those who’ve adopted a dialectical approach (from Rescher to van Eemeren and Grootendorst) have remained within the mainstream tradition in this respect: their subject matter is a kind of argumentation that focuses on the standpoints taken toward the propositional content of claims put forward in natural languages.