Groups, Norms and Practices by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030495909
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

7. Wherein is Reasoning Social?

Ladislav Koreň1

(1)Philosophical Faculty, University of Hradec Králové, Hradec Králové, Czechia

Ladislav Koreň

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

One of the main tenets of inferentialism is that reasoning is primarily a competence to play the social game of giving and asking for reasons. A rather similar idea has recently been elaborated from the naturalistic perspective by Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. They argue that reasoning evolved originally and primarily for the purposes of social justification and argumentation. In this chapter I compare the inferentialist account of reasoning with the approach of Mercier and Sperber. I argue that although Mercier-Sperber’s naturalistic hypothesis is promising, their account of how reasoning works faces a number of philosophical objections that inferentialism has the resources to overcome. At the same time, I show that “naturalized” inferentialists could find congenial much of what Mercier and Sperber have to say about the social origins and functions of reasoning. Finally, I consider a different naturalistic account of the social nature of reasoning due to Michael Tomasello, who submits that reasoning evolved primarily for cooperative argumentation and joint or collective decision-making. I argue that Tomasello’s account may go too far in the collectivist tradition and I conclude that a more plausible naturalistic account of the sociality of human reasoning would likely recognize a mix of different social contexts and functions of reasoning.

Keywords

ReasoningInferentialismArgumentative theory of reasoningCollective intentionality

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