A cognitive explanation of the 'follows'

Authors

  • Cícero Antônio Cavalcante Barroso Professor Adjunto da Universidade Federal do Ceará

Keywords:

Deductive inference. Neurobiological basis of deduction. Logical realism.

Abstract

The main starting point of any deductive logic is the fact that some statements necessarily follow from others. The logic provides rules that allow us to demonstrate that connections between statements, but you can still ask why we should accept these rules. There are several possible responses. In this article, I will briefly analyze some of them, but I will focus on exposing and analyzing the cognitive response, by which the rules of logic should be accepted because we have certain innate mechanisms of deductive processing that enable us to see that the elementary logical inferences are valid. By analyzing that explanation, I will also try to show that it seems to lead to a stronger metaphysical thesis, viz that the design of our module of logical processing tells us something about the logical properties of our world.

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Published

2015-01-01

Issue

No. 13

Section

Varia

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