UNIVERSITA’ DEGLI STUDI DI CAGLIARI
DIPARTIMENTO DI PEDAGOGIA, PSICOLOGIA E FILOSOFIA
CORSO DI LAUREA IN SCIENZE DELLA COMUNICAZIONE

Giovedì 4 febbraio,
ore 15, AULA 6

Errors of Reasoning Vindicated

Prof. Lorenzo Magnani
Università di Pavia

Third way reasoning (Woods) is reasoning whose goodness, when good, does not require  fulfilment of the deductive validity or inductive strength standards commonly invoked in philosophy and elsewhere. Human agents are not in general dedicated to error avoidance like “classical” logical agents. I will take advantage of my own research on the concept of abduction, which vindicates the positive cognitive value of the fallacy of the affirming the consequent (that is an “error of reasoning”) thanks to the so-called EC-model (Eco-Cognitive model) of abduction. The chance of finding an abductive solution appears to depend on the starting of the application of a logic implementing an appropriate formal inference engine. By analyzing abductive inferential processes  a first interesting result is that irrelevance and implausibility not always are offensive to reason. The relevance of a guessed hypothesis results a trivial requirement and something similar can be said in the case of plausibility. Not only, in general we cannot be sure that our guessed hypotheses are plausible (even if we know that looking — in advance — for plausibility is a human good and wise heuristic), indeed an implausible hypothesis can later on result plausible.

Facoltà di Studi Umanistici
via Is Mirrionis, 1, Cagliari