Logic in the Wild

CALL FOR PAPERS

workshop on 

LOGIC IN THE WILD 

Ghent University, 9 & 10 November 2017. 

The scope of this workshop

Nowadays we are witnessing a ‘practical’, or cognitive turn in logic. The approach draws on enormous achievements of a legion of formal and mathematical logicians, but focuses on ‘the Wild’: actual human processes of reasoning and argumentation. Moreover, high standards of inquiry that we owe to formal logicians offer a new quality in research on reasoning and argumentation. In terms of John Corcoran’s distinction between logic as formal ontology and logic as formal epistemology, the aim of the practical turn is to make formal epistemology even more epistemically oriented. This is not to say that this ‘practically turned’ (or cognitively oriented) logic becomes just a part of psychology. This is to say that this logic acquires a new task of “systematically keeping track of changing representations of information”, as Johan van Benthem puts it, and that it contests the claim that the distinction between descriptive and normative accounts of reasoning is disjoint and exhaustive. From a different than purely psychological perspective logic becomes -- again -- interested in answering Dewey’s question about the Wild: how do we think? This is the new alluring face of psychologism, or cognitivism, in logic, as opposed to the old one, which Frege and Husserl fought against. This is the area of research to which our workshop is devoted.

For this workshop we invite submissions on:

- applications of logic to the analysis of actual human reasoning and argumentation processes.

- tools and methods suited for such applications.

- neural basis of logical reasoning.

- educational issues of cognitively-oriented logic.

Keynote speakers

Keith Stenning (University of Edinburgh)

Iris van Rooij (Radboud University Nijmegen)

Christian Strasser (Ruhr University Bochum)

How to submit an abstract

We welcome submissions on any topic that fits into the scope as described above. Send your abstract of 300 to 500 words to: [email protected]  before 10 September 2017.

Notification of acceptance: 22 September 2017.

Website

More information about the workshop (venue, registration, …) is available at

. The programme will be available there in October.

Background

This workshop is organized by the scientific research network Logical and Methodological Analysis of Scientific Reasoning Processes (LMASRP) which is sponsored by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO).

All information about the network can be found at http://www.lmasrp.ugent.be/

An overview of the previous workshops of the network can be found at http://www.lrr.ugent.be/.