The Particular-First View of Deductive Reasoning
In my 2019 paper ‘Knowledge of Logical Generality and the Possibility of Deductive Reasoning’ and my forthcoming book Reasoning and Carroll’s Regress: A Cognitivist View, I advance a view of the psychology and epistemology of deductive reasoning, which I call ‘particular-first’. On this view deductive reasoning can be a purely particular affair in that what psychologically enables and justifies a sample of deductive reasoning can be acceptance of a particular fact of entailment.
I am now interested in further developing the particular-first view, and looking at:
- the relation of the particular-first view to particularism and generalism, which are metaphysical views about the existence of general principles or laws in a given domain;
- whether the particular-first view can be put to work in other domains than competence with deductive reasoning, such as moral and linguistic competence.
The paper ‘Deductive Reasoning without Rule-Following’, which I am co-writing with Anandi Hattiangadi, investigates the relevance of my particular-first view to the Kripke/Birman’s Adoption Problem: draft.
Knowing How
I have a longstanding interest in debates concerning the nature of knowing how, which was prompted by Ryle’s interpretation of Carroll’s Regress as showing that knowing a rule of logic is a kind of knowing how. (See my 2021 paper ‘Knowing How to Reason Logically’.) I am now drawing on some of Ryle’s insights to formulate an account of knowing how, according to which it is knowing a norm of action.