Naturalizing logic: Errors of reasoning vindicated: Logic reapproaches cognitive science

A complete revision of mainstream logic is an urgent task to be achieved. This revision will be able to bring logic into a creative rapprochement with cognitive science. This can be achieved by trying to do for logic what over forty years ago Quine and others attempted for epistemology. It is necessary to propose a “naturalization” of the logic of human inference. This paper deals with an examination of how the naturalization process might go, together with some indication of what might be achieved by it. To assist the reader in understanding the naturalization of logic I will take advantage of my own research on the concept of abduction, which vindicates the positive cognitive value of the fallacy of the affirming the consequent thanks to the so-called EC-model (Eco-Cognitive model), and of the recent book Errors of Reasoning: Naturalizing the Logic of Inference (2013) [86], by John Woods. While this paper certainly aims at promoting the research program on the naturalization of logic, it also further advocates the placement of abduction in the research programmes of logic, and stresses to what extent our contemporary philosophical and logical tradition is indebted towards Charles Sanders Peirce, a thinker often praised for his productivity but whose quality and importance are too often overlooked.