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 aquires 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 this workshop is devoted.
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: lrr@ugent.be before 10 September 2017. Notification of acceptance: 22 September 2017.