Reasoning in the Wild

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, demonstrating its distributed nature and the fundamentality of trust; that communication shapes action within the context of the common mind, revealing how speech systems are fundamental to how reasoning is structured and 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, and 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.