How? Enarrativity and the Cognition of Explicative Thinking: A New Theory of Constructive Reasoning

This book develops a modern evolutionary anthropological theory of the cognitive conditions for explanatory descriptions of the world.
Within the broad framework of processual hermeneutics, this monograph studies rationality by investigating what are the fundamental cognitive mechanisms required for the cultural development of rational constructions. It analyses the basic cognitive competences through which the human being connects categories and operations in a manner that allows it to orient itself in the world. If both understanding and explaining are forms of human-specific orientation, what does asking the question "how" imply cognitively? This monograph focuses therefore on the human-specific array of cognitive mechanisms, here referred to as enarrativity.

Javier Y. Álvarez-Vázquez is private lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, where his research and teaching focus on the cognition of explicative thinking and processual hermeneutics. Before that he was Assistant Professor and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Heidelberg University.