Reasoning in the Wild: The Public Works of Reason (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy)

Philosophy has long wrongfully imprisoned reasoning within the isolated chambers of the individual mind. This book shatters this confinement, laying foundations of a groundbreaking framework that conceptualizes reasoning as protocol-articulated action governed by socially shared norms and unfolding across diverse sites of processing.

While logicians portray reasoning as inhabiting an abstract system of rules applied to propositions, this book argues that this portrayal distorts the truth of the matter. Reasoning in the Wild is founded on the principle that the relation of logical consequence is best understood as a relation between concrete acts, not between abstract propositions inhabiting inference systems. This is the zeroeth principle of logic. Consonant with this principle, the book proceeds to illuminate: the vital concept of the common mind―the shared understandings and ways of thinking that exist within a community; how reasoning is inherently social, a public work that unfolds across various sites of processing, operating on principles of trust; that communication shapes action within the context of the common mind, but subject to manipulation that can contribute to polarization; that public sentiment is a powerful, macrosocial force shaped by interlocking processes of shared understanding and strategic communication; and finally, how a disjointed common mind can result from persistent false narratives. The book provocatively considers the role of generative AI in either exacerbating or ameliorating this condition.

Reasoning in the Wild is a keen philosophical intervention on a broad range of interconnected topics around the public works of reasoning, for scholars and graduate students in philosophy and the social sciences, particularly the sciences of mind, logic, the social world and communication. It promises to reshape fundamentally our understanding of how we reason, not in terms of isolated mental activity but within the rich tapestry of human connection and public life.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

View an online resource for the book here.

Mariam Thalos is Distinguished Professor and past Department Head of Philosophy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her work spans a wide swath of philosophy, social science and decision theory. She is the author of numerous scholarly books and articles, including Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe (2013) and A Social Theory of Freedom (2016).