ABSTRACT
We have built a comprehensive understanding of reasoning as a force in the world with real-time manifestations at practically every human-relevant scale. This has thrust before us from the start, and quite unceremoniously, the inescapable fact that the capacity for reasoning, both in terms of sources and types of content and in terms of hardware and processing power, is obliged to be distributed over multiple sites, sometimes an unimaginably large number of sites. Taking this fact seriously militates against the rationalist model with a unified central processing unit drawing on intel from informant units (construed as external to itself and completely untrusted) and propels instead towards a model of reasoning in terms of acts performed by units that are differentially trustworthy coming together—under the zeroeth principle of logic—to form a joined-up whole that is itself a unit of reasoning. The principles governing distributed reasoning unify our efforts to address challenges in all the following areas: (1) distributed reasoning in the brain; (2) distributed reasoning in micro-social contexts (i.e. small groups interacting more or less all together through various conversation media); and (3) distributed reasoning on the largest canvases of all—the community, the state and ultimately the globe, and beyond. Units performing reasoning interact in a large variety of different configurations through a wide variety of networks that are subjected to multiple sorts of barriers to information flow, pressures for sentiment falsification, publicity effects and many other things. Taking seriously the fact of distributed reasoning foregrounds the age-old problems of induction—the problem of insecure inference—as the most fundamental problem of all of inference, not merely as regards the lofty problems of absent applicable monotonic logic schemas worthy of the name but also the problems around trust. The problems of insecure inference are not second-class problems: they are the fundamental problems of reasoning. And this means that we are obliged to understand the problems of reasoning as problems of devising protocols and procedures that enhance the utility of evidence, wherever it comes from, and however varying in quality. Important in our considerations too have been the absence of evidence, obstacles to gathering evidence, and the spaces created for self-creation and world-making by certain gaps in evidence. Finally, we explored the ways that humans create worlds for themselves, and subsequently are obliged to navigate, maintain and re-shape those worlds, at least in large part through employing a suite of reasoning protocols.
