Practices of Reason. Fusing the Inferentialist and Scientific Image

Abstract

The last three decades have seen a renaissance in Anglo-American philosophy of efforts to think of human reasoning as constitutively social and, indeed, discursive. This approach does not see reason primarily as an organ for an individual’s solitary explanations and predictions of events in the environment and for making solitary plans and decisions accordingly – thus enhancing the individual’s chances to do well – and only derivatively also as an organ that enables rational social interaction with other reasoning individuals. Rather the other way around. Reason is seen as primarily and constitutively an organ for linguistic communication, for the interpersonal pooling of information, and for cooperation, and only derivatively also as an organ for an individual’s solitary, internalized ratiocinations. Surely one way to reason is to reason in dialogue with others, when we make plans for joint actions, give reasons by making claims, ask for reasons by posing questions, and critically query each other’s claims or decisions and the reasons given for them. And according to the view in question, such cooperative and discursive reasoning is the original mode of reasoning, from which other modes, such as reasoning in foro interno, derive. Using a term coined by Dorit Bar-On, Ladislav Koreň, in his excellent book, calls this view ‘language rationalism.’ (4) Koreň’s point of entry is the observation that key contemporary ‘language rationalists,’ such as Robert Brandom, Huw Price, and John McDowell, building on classical works by figures such as Wittgenstein, Wilfrid Sellars, Michael Dummett, and Donald Davidson, proceed largely in armchair fashion, mainly ignoring empirical work on human (and primate) social cognition, discursive abilities, and reasoning. This, in Koreň’s words,