ABSTRACT
In this chapter—the engine room of the book—we work towards displaying a number of core general reasoning forms, some purely implicit, all formally described and premised on the zeroeth principle of the last chapter. We lay down the foundation of our system of reasoning in three major steps. First, we clear the philosophical ground by examining three influential but ultimately incomplete conceptions of reasoning—reasoning as deduction, reasoning as model-building and reasoning as inconsistency-reduction—to show precisely what a more robust theory must accomplish. Second, we construct the core of our alternative, presenting reasoning as a species of acting and introducing the formal architecture of our protocol-based system. Finally, having built the basics of our engine, we put it to work. We use this protocol-based system in a series of detailed case studies, demonstrating how it provides a powerful explanation for complex and mystifying neurological phenomena such as Capgras syndrome. While Philosophy does not routinely insert itself into the business of saying how patterns of reasoning arise in the wild among organisms like ourselves, or how the physiologies of our brains produce them, it should nonetheless be interested in (1) a broad taxonomy of them, (2) an assessment as to a kind of validity they might possess, (3) how they interact with one another and with the forms of reasoning acknowledged in current scholarly literature on inference, (4) how they result in beliefs (when they do), (5) the varieties of beliefs and bodies of belief they result in, and finally (6) how they contribute to building intellectual cultures—including institutions of science, law and art—and the political self-organizing around ideas that we now observe. This chapter (and this book generally) aims to contribute the beginnings of systematic answers to many of these questions, without making any claims about completeness or comprehensiveness.
