The Dialogical Roots of Deduction Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on Reasoning

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.

Preface; Part I. The Philosophy of Deduction: 1. The trouble with deduction; 2. Back to the roots of deduction; 3. The Prover-Skeptic dialogues; 4. Deduction as a dialogical notion; Part II. The History of Deduction: 5. Deduction in mathematics and dialectic in Ancient Greece; 6. Aristotle's syllogistic, and other ancient logical traditions; 7. Logic and deduction in the Middle Ages and the modern period; Part III. Deduction and Cognition: 8. How we reason, individually and in groups; 9. The ontogeny of deductive reasoning; 10. The phylogeny of deductive reasoning; 11. A dialogical account of proofs in mathematical practice; Conclusions.

Catarina Dutilh Novaes is Professor of Philosophy and University Research Chair at VU Amsterdam, and Professorial Fellow at Arché (University of St Andrews). She is the author of Formalizing Medieval Logical Theories (2007) and Formal Languages in Logic (Cambridge, 2012), and is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (with Stephen Read, Cambridge, 2016).