Abstract
The naturalization of logic aims at a revision of mainstream logic. In this article, I contend it is an urgent task to be completed. This new project will permit a new collaboration between logic and cognitive science. This can be accomplished doing for logic what many decades ago Quine and other philosophers undertook in the case of epistemology. First of all, this article analyzes how the naturalization can be achieved thanks to some insights provided by the recent John Woods’ book Errors of Reasoning: Naturalizing the Logic of Inference; important concepts that regard a naturalized logic are synthetically analyzed: errors (and the problem of fallacies), paradigm creep, third-way reasoning, consequence-having and consequence drawing, agent based reasoning. The article also takes advantage of my own studies, which are aimed both at exculpating the negative fallacious character of abduction (it is the fallacy of the affirming the consequent) and at illustrating the EC-model (Eco-Cognitive model) of it, I have recently proposed. Aiming at encouraging the project of naturalization of logic, the article specifically recommends the increase of logical research on abduction, and emphasizes how current philosophical and logical research on human inferences is indebted towards Charles Sanders Peirce, a philosopher whose importance and modernity are too often underestimated. The final part of the article will introduce an analysis of the importance of the so-called optimization of situatedness, a concept that is necessary to understand that maximization of “abducibility”, which characterizes modern science.
Highlights
The naturalization of logic aims at a revision of mainstream logic
The article takes advantage of my own studies, which are aimed both at exculpating the negative fallacious character of abduction and at illustrating the EC-model (Eco-Cognitive model) of it, I have recently proposed
If we aim at delineating this project of naturalization of logic first of all we have to state the extreme importance of cognitive science and of its commitment to empirical research: I am here referring to those empirical observations which regard how people reason in various contexts
Summary
Peirce considered it unlikely to be able to build an agent-based “logic” and —for example—a logic of human abductive cognition, pragmatically oriented. It would be better for logic to rethink fallacious reasoning in a novel perspective and the naturalization of logic is surely the correct method able to pursue this target In this perspective, Woods’s book Errors of Reasoning represents a kind of “manifesto” of the naturalization of logic: it exactly states the two main preconditions of the project, the need of both (1) redeeming fallacies and (2) criticizing the excess of prescriptive authority contended by formal models of ideal reasoners. Woods’s book Errors of Reasoning represents a kind of “manifesto” of the naturalization of logic: it exactly states the two main preconditions of the project, the need of both (1) redeeming fallacies and (2) criticizing the excess of prescriptive authority contended by formal models of ideal reasoners In this framework, we can see fallacies as active, possibly in a negative way, both in everyday and scientific reasoning, but, the facto, as the occasional best tool for arriving to reliable cognitive results. Reliable belief is sufficient for human collectives to realize a good fitness, as they do, and, in this sense, belief seems more “economical” than completely attained knowledge
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