Can animals reason? If so, what would their reasoning consist in, and how, if at all, would it differ from its human counterpart? On these questions, John Locke stakes out a position that also merits consideration today. I argue that, for Locke, reasoning is a matter of the subject's construing her mental states as support for a conclusion, where that conclusion can be a self‐directed imperative. Locke does not require that the subject represent the rules governing her inferences, nor that she use language or deploy abstract ideas. I argue that Locke's particularist, imagistic account is worth taking seriously in the contemporary debates over the nature of inference and animal reasoning.
Although much ink has been spilled in discussing the relationship between rationality and normative reasons on the one hand and normative reasons and reasoning on the other, surprisingly little has been said about whether we can understand rationality in terms of reasoning. I propose a novel way to understand structu...
Hossein Ayati· Journal of the American Phil...· 0 citations
The book presents a novel, abductivist theory of knowledge and argues for it over its two main rivals: safety theory and causal explanationism. According to abductivism, a belief constitutes knowledge when, given the way it is formed or maintained, the best explanation of its being true rather than false lies in the...
We often accuse others, and sometimes ourselves, of engaging in, as psychologists are apt to term it, “motivated reasoning.” This is the charge that the collection, use, and interpretation of information have been warped by one'sdesires, andis often regarded as amounting to a charge of epistemic irrationality. In a 2...
Yuval Avnur, Dion Scott-Kakures· Philosophical Perspectives· 0 citations
While logical expressivism and logical conventionalism share many commitments, the most prominent versions of these positions diverge in the kind of logical inferentialism they endorse. Jared Warren’s logical conventionalism adopts a form of unrestricted inferentialism, whereas logical expressivism naturally supports...
The existence of middle-sized systems in the universe is far from accidental; it carries significant consequences for our understanding of both physics and metaphysics, bearing on the epistemic assumptions of the former and the role of causality in the latter. By examining how science actually engages with individual...
J. Sánchez-Cañizares· Topoi· 0 citations
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