Medieval Obligationes as Logical Games of Consistency Maintenance

Novaes, Catarina Dutilh

doi:10.1007/s11229-005-6197-y

Cited by 22 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Still, to excel in such groups, it may be necessary to anticipate how one's own arguments might be evaluated by others and to adjust these arguments accordingly. Showing one's ability to anticipate objections may be a valuable culturally acquired skill, as in medieval disputationes (see Novaes 2005). By anticipating objections, one may even be able to recognize flaws in one's own hypotheses and go on to revise them.…”

Section: Conclusion: Reasoning and Rationalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory

Mercier¹,

2011

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Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all these instances traditionally described as failures or flaws, reasoning does exactly what can be expected of an argumentative device: Look for arguments that support a given conclusion, and, ceteris paribus, favor conclusions for which arguments can be found. Abstract: Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given the exceptional dependence of humans on communication and their vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology of reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing, but also when they are reasoning proactively from the perspective of having to defend their opinions. Reasoning so motivated can distort evaluations and attitudes and allow erroneous beliefs to persist. Proactively used reasoning also favors decisions that are easy to justify but not necessarily better. In all the...

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Section: Conclusion: Reasoning and Rationalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory

Mercier¹,

2011

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“…9 9 One could say however that anticipating arguments for the other point of view can help win a debate. While this is true, it mostly applies to formal debates in which participants have the leisure to prepare their arguments and are more concerned with seeming articulate than with actually arriving at a good solution (medieval obligationes being a good example, see Novaes, 2005). In less formal settings, it is much easier to let the interlocutor find arguments for her point of view: she will typically be in a much better position to do so. …”

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confidence: 99%

Reasoning Is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation

Mercier¹,

Landemore²

2012

Political Psychology

192

136

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Theoreticians of deliberative democracy have sometimes found it hard to relate to the seemingly contradictory experimental results produced by psychologists and political scientists. We suggest that this problem may be alleviated by inserting a layer of psychological theory between the empirical results and the normative political theory. In particular, we expose the argumentative theory of reasoning that makes the observed pattern of findings more coherent. According to this theory, individual reasoning mechanisms work best when used to produce and evaluate arguments during a public deliberation. It predicts that when diverse opinions are discussed, group reasoning will outperform individual reasoning. It also predicts that individuals have a strong confirmation bias. When people reason either alone or with like-minded peers, this confirmation bias leads them to reinforce their initial attitudes, explaining individual and group polarization. We suggest that the failures of reasoning are most likely to be remedied at the collective than at the individual level. Theoreticians of deliberative democracy have sometimes found it hard to relate to the

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“…We now progressively present dialogical logic. Although the study of dialecticsthe art of correct debate -and logic -the science of valid reasoning -have been intrinsically linked since their beginnings [8,35,7], modern mathematical logic had to wait until the 50s of the last century to ensure that the logical concept of validity was expressed through the use of dialogical concepts and techniques. Inspired by the Philosophical Investigations of Wittgenstein [40], the German mathematician and philosopher Lorenzen [28] proposed to analyze the concept of validity of a formula F through the concept of winning strategy in a particular type of two-player game.…”

Section: Dialogical Logicmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialogical Argumentation and Textual Entailment

Catta

Moot

Retoré

2021

Studies in Computational Intelligence

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In this chapter, we introduce a new dialogical system for first order classical logic which is close to natural language argumentation, and we prove its completeness with respect to usual classical validity. We combine our dialogical system with the Grail syntactic and semantic parser developed by the second author in order to address automated textual entailment, that is, we use it for deciding whether or not a sentence is a consequence of a short text. This work -which connects natural language semantics and argumentation with dialogical logic -can be viewed as a step towards an inferentialist view of natural language semantics.

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Medieval Obligationes as Logical Games of Consistency Maintenance

Cited by 22 publications

References 17 publications

Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory

Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory

Reasoning Is for Arguing: Understanding the Successes and Failures of Deliberation

Dialogical Argumentation and Textual Entailment

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