Abstracts

Errors of Reasoning Exculpated

Lorenzo Magnani University of Pavia

A complete revision of mainstream logic is an urgent task to be achieved. This revision will be able to bring logic into a creative rapprochement with cognitive science. This can be achieved by trying to do for logic what over forty years ago Quine and others attempted for epistemology. It is necessary to propose a "naturalization" of the logic of human inference. To assist the attenders in understanding the naturalization of logic I will take advantage of my own research on the concept of abduction, which vindicates the positive cognitive value of the fallacy of the affirming the consequent (that is an "error of reasoning") thanks to the so-called EC-model (Eco-Cognitive model) of abduction.

The chance of finding an abductive solution appears to depend on the starting of the application of a logic implementing an appropriate formal inference engine. By analyzing abductive inferential processes a first interesting result is that irrelevance and implausibility not always are offensive to reason. The relevance of a guessed hypothesis results a trivial requirement and something similar can be said in the case of plausibility. Not only, in general we cannot be sure that our guessed hypotheses are plausible (even if we know that looking – in advance -- for plausibility is a human good and wise heuristic), indeed an implausible hypothesis can later on result plausible.