Abstract
The question of whether reasoning can, or should, be described by a single normative model is an important one. In the following, I combine epistemological considerations taken from Piaget’s notion of genetic epistemology, a hypothesis about the role of reasoning in communication and developmental data to argue that some basic logical principles are in fact highly normative. I argue here that explicit, analytic human reasoning, in contrast to intuitive reasoning, uniformly relies on a form of validity that allows distinguishing between valid and invalid arguments based on the existence of counterexamples to conclusions.
Highlights
I combine epistemological considerations taken from Piaget’s notion of genetic epistemology, a hypothesis about the role of reasoning in communication and developmental data to argue that some basic logical principles are highly normative
The logical position essentially claimed that humans possessed an inferential apparatus that would invariably lead to inferences that corresponded to those found in elementary logic textbooks, reprising Boole’s view that Boolean logic described human reasoning
There is little surface evidence that the use of classical propositional logic as a consistent basis for inferential reasoning is very wide-spread, even among highly educated populations. One reaction to these studies has been an attempt to reject the idea that human reasoning is logical at all, by suggesting that much of the inferential apparatus is dominated by biologically based forms of inference
Summary
If this basic distinction is reasonably accurate, the ability to even consider the possibility that normative models could exist must be the result of System 2 processing. COMMUNICATION AND NORMATIVE REASONING Having a shared epistemology is certainly useful in order to allow different members of a species to process variable information in ways that are internally consistent.
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