Category: Logic

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes I am currently supervising a MA thesis on interpersonal justification (by Sebastiano Lommi), and this is providing me with the opportunity to connect the dots between a number of topics and questions I’ve been interested in for years. In particular questions pertaining the epistemic value of deliberation, metaphors for argumentation, and…

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes It is well known that philosophers like to argue, and one of the things they like to argue about is arguing itself. Argumentation is frequently (and rightly, to my mind) taken to be a core feature of philosophical practice, and thus how to argue becomes a central topic for philosophical methodology.…

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi)  This is the second and final part of my 'brief introduction' to formal methods in philosophy to appear in the forthcoming Bloomsbury Philosophical Methodology Reader, being edited by Joachim Horvath. (Part I is here.) In this part I present in more detail the four papers included in the formal methods section,…

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted in M-Phi) There is a Bloomsbury Philosophical Methodology Reader in the making, being edited by Joachim Horvath (Cologne). Joachim asked me to edit the section on formal methods, which will contain four papers: Tarski's 'On the concept of following logically', excerpts from Carnap's Logical Foundations of Probability, Hansson's 2000 'Formalization in philosophy', and a commissioned…

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi)  This is the final post in my series on reductio ad absurdum from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, here is Part II, here is Part III, here is Part IV, and here is Part V. I now return to the issues raised in the earlier posts equipped with the dialogical account of…

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is the fifth installment of my series of posts on reductio ad absurdum from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, here is Part II, here is Part III, and here is Part IV. In this post I discuss a closely related argumentative strategy, namely dialectical refutation, and argue that it can…

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is the fourth installment of my series of posts on reductio ad absurdum arguments from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, here is Part II, and here is Part III. In this post I offer a précis of the dialogical account of deduction which I have been…

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is the third installment of my series of posts on reductio ad absurdum arguments from a dialogical perspective. Here is Part I, and here is Part II. In this post I discuss issues pertaining specifically to the last step in a reductio argument, namely that of going from…

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes  (Cross-posted at M-Phi) This is a series of posts with sections of the paper on reductio ad absurdum from a dialogical perspective that I am working on right now. This is Part II, here is Part I. In this post I discuss issues in connection with the first step in a reductio…

  • By Catarina Dutilh Novaes (Cross-posted at M-Phi) As some readers may recall, I ran a couple of posts on reductio proofs from a dialogical perspective quite some time ago (here and here). I am now *finally* writing the paper where I systematize the account. In the coming days I'll be posting sections of the paper; as always,…