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Funding: This research was generously supported by the European Research Council with grant ERC-2017-CoG 771074 for the project ‘The Social Epistemology of Argumentation’. In this paper, I highlight the significance of practices of refutation in philosophical inquiry, that is, practices of showing that a claim, person or theory is wrong. I present and contrast two prominent approaches to philosophical refutation: refutation in ancient Greek dialectic (elenchus), in its Socratic variant as described in Plato’s dialogues, and as described in Aristotle’s logical texts; and the practice of providing counterexamples to putative definitions familiar from twentieth century analytic philosophy, focusing on the so-called Gettier problem. Moreover, I discuss Lakatos’ method of proofs and refutations, as it offers insightful observations on the dynamics between arguments, refutations, and counterexamples. Overall, I argue that dialectic, in particular in its Socratic variant, is especially suitable for the philosophical purpose of questioning the obvious, as it invites reflection on one’s own doxastic commitments and on the tensions and inconsistencies within one’s set of beliefs. By contrast, the counterexample-based approach to philosophical refutation can give rise to philosophical theorizing that is overly focused on hairsplitting disputes, thus becoming alienated from the relevant human experiences. Insofar as philosophical inquiry treads the fine line between questioning the obvious while still seeking to say something significant about human experiences, perhaps a certain amount of what Lakatos describes as ‘monster-barring’—a rejection of overly fanciful, artificial putative counterexamples—has its place in philosophical argumentation. Publisher PDF

This research is generously supported by the European Research Council with grant ERC-2017-CoG 771074 for the project ‘The Social Epistemology of Argumentation’. Public engagement is one of the fundamental pillars of the European programme for research and innovation Horizon 2020. The programme encourages engagement that not only fosters science education and dissemination, but also promotes two-way dialogues between scientists and the public at various stages of research. Establishing such dialogues between different groups of societal actors is seen as crucial in order to attain epistemic as well as social desiderata at the intersection between science and society. However, whether these dialogues can actually help attaining these desiderata is far from obvious. This paper discusses some of the costs, risks, and benefits of dialogical public engagement practices, and proposes a strategy to analyse these argumentative practices based on a three-tiered model of epistemic exchange. As a case study, we discuss the phenomenon of vaccine hesitancy, arguably a result of suboptimal public engagement, and show how the proposed model can shed new light on the problem. Publisher PDF

Since at least the 1980s, the role of adversariality in argumentation has been extensively discussed within different domains. Prima facie, there seem to be two extreme positions on this issue: argumentation should (ideally at least) never be adversarial, as we should always aim for cooperative argumentative engagement; argumentation should be and in fact is always adversarial, given that adversariality (when suitably conceptualized) is an intrinsic property of argumentation. I here defend the view that specific instances of argumentation are (and should be) adversarial or cooperative to different degrees. What determines whether an argumentative situation should be primarily adversarial or primarily cooperative are contextual features and background conditions external to the argumentative situation itself, in particular the extent to which the parties involved have prior conflicting or else convergent interests. To further develop this claim, I consider three teloi that are frequently associated with argumentation: the epistemic telos, the consensus-building telos, and the conflict management telos. I start with a brief discussion of the concepts of adversariality, cooperation, and conflict in general. I then sketch the main lines of the debates in the recent literature on adversariality in argumentation. Next, I discuss the three teloi of argumentation listed above in turn, emphasizing the roles of adversariality and cooperation for each of them.

Overdoing Democracy is an important contribution to the literature on (deliberative) democracy, as it offers a sobering diagnosis of the risks and pitfalls of (overdoing) democracy in the form of internal critique. But the book does not go far enough in its diagnosis because it is not sufficiently critical towards some of the basic assumptions of deliberative conceptions of democracy. In particular, Talisse does not sufficiently attend to the inevitable power struggles in a society, where different groups and individuals must protect their own (often conflicting) interests instead of working towards a ‘common good.’ In this essay, I contrast two different visions of democracy and politics, one based on ideals of consensus and cooperation, and another on the inevitability of perennial conflict. I then briefly present an alternative to deliberative conceptions of democracy that has gained traction in recent decades, known as agonism. Next, I offer a short reconstruction of Talisse’s proposal, and finally I sketch a critical assessment of some of his main claims and assumptions from an agonistic perspective.

Nancy Bauer was invited to submit a reply and offered several extensions to the deadline for doing so. After considerable delay to publication, and by mutual agreement among the editors, critics, and author, it was decided that these three symposium pieces would be published on their own. –the Editors.(Let me start with a disclaimer: This is a piece inspired by How to do Things with Pornography (HTDTWP) by Nancy Bauer (2015), but it is not a commentary on the book as such. I here discuss a number of themes that I think are already latent in the book, but I end up developing a few ideas of my own.)

In recent years, substructural approaches to paradoxes have become quite popular. But whatever restrictions on structural rules we may want to enforce, it is highly desirable that such restrictions be accompanied by independent philosophical motivation, not directly related to paradoxes. Indeed, while these recent developments have shed new light on a number of issues pertaining to paradoxes, it seems that we now have even more open questions than before, in particular two very pressing ones: what (independent) motivations do we have (if any) for restrictions on structural rules, and what to make of the plurality of new logics emerging from these restrictions, i.e. how to ‘choose’ among the different options. In this paper, we address these two questions from the perspective of a dialogical conception of logic that we've been advocating in recent years. We will argue that dialogical interpretations of structural rules, that is, as rules determining specific properties of the dialogues in question, provide a conveniently neutral framework to adjudicate between the different substructural proposals that have been made in the literature on paradoxes.

What is the relevance of historical, and in particular genealogical, investigations for projects of conceptual engineering? I address this question by bringing together two prominent authors in each of these traditions: Foucault for genealogy, and Carnap for conceptual engineering. I argue that Foucaultian genealogy is a suitable approach to address a specific lacuna in Carnap’s articulation of explication, namely, insufficient attention for the preliminary stage of clarifying the explicandum. Moreover, the focus on practices in Foucaultian genealogies facilitates a reflection on the functions of the concept to be explicated, which is crucial for the fruitfulness of the explication as a whole. I start by canvassing a number of commonalities between Carnap and Foucault, as they were both influenced by Kant and Nietzsche; they shared a number of philosophical commitments such as a rejection of metaphysics and a tolerant meta-normative stance. I then discuss the lacuna in Carnapian explication, and argue that Foucaultian genealogy provides the right level of detail to remedy this lacuna. I close with a discussion of a concrete example, the concept of marriage, and conclude that this combination of Carnapian explication with Foucaultian genealogy is an illustration of the relevance of historical analysis for conceptual engineering.

This comprehensive account of the concept and practices of deduction is the first to bring together perspectives from philosophy, history, psychology and cognitive science, and mathematical practice. Catarina Dutilh Novaes draws on all of these perspectives to argue for an overarching conceptualization of deduction as a dialogical practice: deduction has dialogical roots, and these dialogical roots are still largely present both in theories and in practices of deduction. Dutilh Novaes' account also highlights the deeply human and in fact social nature of deduction, as embedded in actual human practices; as such, it presents a highly innovative account of deduction. The book will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from advanced students to senior scholars, and from philosophers to mathematicians and cognitive scientists.

Deep disagreements are often thought to be unresolvable. In this paper, we discuss a specific case of apparent deep disagreement, namely the public debate on the polemic figure of Black Pete in the Netherlands, where a noticeable change in public opinion has occurred in recent years. We present the preliminary findings of a study on Twitter interactions on the topic, focusing in particular on how arguments spread outside ‘epistemic bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’.

This chapter takes as its starting point the widespread view that logic and reasoning are closely related. It briefly surveys the historical developments leading to this view, and then discusses empirical findings pertaining to the question of whether deductive logic is an adequate descriptive model for human reasoning. This body of research suggests that there are significant, systematic discrepancies between the canons of deductive logic and human reasoning, and thus that logic does not offer an adequate description of human reasoning.

A range of formal models of human reasoning have been proposed in a number of fields such as philosophy, logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, cognitive science, etc.: various logics (epistemic logics; non-monotonic logics), probabilistic systems (most notably, but not exclusively, Bayesian probability theory), belief revision systems, neural networks, among others. Now, it seems reasonable to require that formal models of human reasoning be (minimally) empirically adequate if they are to be viewed as models of the phenomena in question. How are formal models of human reasoning typically put to empirical test? One way to do so is to isolate a number of key principles of the system, and design experiments to gauge the extent to which participants do or do not follow them in reasoning tasks. Another way is to take relevant existing results and check whether a particular formal model predicts these results. The present investigation provides an illustration of the second kind of empirical testing by comparing two formal models for reasoning – namely the non-monotonic logic known as preferential logic; and a particular version of belief revision theories, screened belief revision – against the reasoning phenomenon known as belief bias in the psychology of reasoning literature: human reasoners typically seek to maintain the beliefs they already hold, and conversely to reject contradicting incoming information. The conclusion of our analysis will be that screened belief revision is more empirically adequate with respect to belief bias than preferential logic and non-monotonic logics in general, as what participants seem to be doing is above all a form of belief management on the basis of background knowledge. The upshot is thus that, while it may offer valuable insights into the nature of human reasoning, preferential logic (and non-monotonic logics in general) is ultimately inadequate as a formal model of the phenomena in question.

Sweet Analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravish'd me,Bene disserere est finis logices.Is to dispute well logic's chiefest end?Affords this art no greater miracle?(Christopher Marlow, Doctor Faustus, Act 1, ...

The paper argues that much of the difficulty with making progress on the issue of the normativity of logic for thought, as discussed in the literature, stems from a misapprehension of what logic is normative for. The claim is that, rather than mono-agent mental processes, (deductive) logic in fact comprises norms for quite specific situations of multi-agent dialogical interactions, in particular special forms of debates. This reconceptualization is inspired by historical developments in logic and mathematics (briefly surveyed in the paper), in particular the pervasiveness of such dialogical conceptions in the early days of logic in ancient Greece. The multi-agent, dialogical perspective then allows for the formulation of compelling 'bridge principles’ between the relation of logical consequence and dialogical normative principles, something that is notoriously difficult to achieve in a mono-agent setting pertaining exclusively to thought and belief. The upshot is also that the truth-preserving rules of logic generally do not have a primary normative bearing on mono-agent mental processes, and in this sense the paper sides with Harman's (1986; 2009) critique of the idea that logic has a normative import for thought and belief.

Although not (yet) entirely mainstream, uses of formal methods for the study of the history of philosophy, the history of logic in particular, represent an important trend in recent philosophical historiography. In this chapter, I discuss what can (and cannot) be achieved by the application of formal methods to the history of philosophy, addressing both motivations and potential pitfalls. The first section focuses on methodological aspects, and the second section presents three case studies of historical theories which have been investigated with formal tools: Aristotle’s syllogistic, Anselm’s ontological argument, and medieval theories of supposition.

In this chapter, I argue that the issue of explanatoriness in mathematical proofs can be fruitfully addressed within the dialogical conceptualization of proofs that I have been developing in recent years. The key idea is to emphasize the observation that a proof is a piece of discourse aimed at an intended audience, with the intent to produce explanatory persuasion. This approach explains both why explanatory proofs are to be preferred over non- or less explanatory ones, and why explanatoriness is an audience-relative property of a proof. This account is also able to clarify a number of features of mathematical practice.

This paper discusses and compares a number of influential definitions of the syllogism in the history of logic. We start with Aristotle, and offer a dialogical interpretation of his definition of a syllogism in the Prior Analytics. We then briefly discuss Boethius and Robert Kilwardby, and finally focus on Ockham and Buridan’s respective definitions. What we observe in these authors over the centuries, especially with Ockham (but with the exception of Boethius), is a diminished focus on the pragmatic dimension of applying syllogisms in certain contexts, in particular but not exclusively dialectical/dialogical contexts. We also observe increased focus on the formal properties of the syllogistic system, in particular the notions of figure and mood (though not in Buridan). And thus, taken as a whole, this analysis may be taken to illustrate a general tendency to move away from logic conceived as a tool for specific applications, and towards a focus on logical theories conceived as objects of study in their own right.

Permutation invariance is often presented as the correct criterion forlogicality. The basic idea is that one can demarcate the realm of logic by isolatingspecific entities—logical notions or constants—and that permutation invariancewould provide a philosophically motivated and technically sophisticated criterionfor what counts as a logical notion. The thesis of permutation invariance as acriterion for logicality has received considerable attention in the literature in recentdecades, and much of the debate is developed against the background of ideas put forth by Tarski in a 1966 lecture (Tarski 1966/1986). But as noted by Tarski himself in the lecture, the permutation invariance criterion yields a class of putative ‘logical constants’ that are essentially only sensitive to the number of elements in classes of individuals. Thus, to hold the permutation invariance thesis essentially amounts to limiting the scope of logic to quantificational phenomena, which is controversial at best and possibly simply wrong. In this paper, I argue that permutation invariance is a misguided approach to the nature of logic because it is not an adequate formal explanans for the informal notion of the generality of logic. In particular, I discuss some cases of undergeneration of the criterion, i.e. the fact that it excludes from the realm of logic operators that we have good reason to regard as logical, especially some modal operators.

Abstract In the scholarship on medieval logic and semantics of the last decades, Ockham’s theory of supposition is probably the most extensively studied version of such theories; yet, it seems that we still do not fully understand all its intricacies. In this paper, I focus on a phrase that occurs countless times throughout Ockham’s writings, but in particular in the sections dedicated to supposition in the Summa logicae: the phrase ‘denotatur’. I claim that an adequate understanding of the role of the concept of denotatur within Ockham’s supposition theory shall yield a deeper understanding of the theory as a whole. Here, I first examine a few uses of the term ‘denotatur’ and its variants by other authors. I then turn to Ockham: first I briefly mention some uses of the term in contexts other than his theory of supposition. Following that, I focus on his supposition theory, in particular on how ‘denotatur’ allows him to deal with two crucial puzzles, namely the supposition of empty terms and the supposition of terms in false affirmative propositions. The treatment of these two puzzles suggests that Ockham’s theory of supposition must be understood as a theory chiefly intended for the generation of the meanings of propositions.