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Podcast: Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast
Episode: Catarina Dutilh Novaes, "The Dialogical Roots of Deduction: Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on Reasoning" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
Description: If all men are mortal, and Socrates is a man, then it must be that Socrates is mortal. What could be more obvious? Well, sometimes obviousness serves to conceal philosophical difficulties. Thereās more going on in this simple deduction than we tend to recognize. For one thing, we areĀ notĀ being asked toĀ assessĀ whether all men are, indeed, mortal. Nor are we asking whether Socrates is indeed a man. Instead, weāre focusing on theĀ logical relationĀ that obtains between those two claims and the third. We claim that the third statement āfollows fromā the combination of the first two...