What is reasoning?
pp. 153-163
in: Angel Garrido, Urszula Wybraniec-Skardowska (eds), The Lvov-Warsaw school, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
The usage of language and cognition have perhaps been the oldest specific features of a human mental activity. However, is there anything really exceptional in the fact that we use language and that we cognise? Is there anything specific in how we do it? It seems that reasoning is especially important among various linguistic and cognitive human activities. But what is reasoning? What is human reasoning? Is there anything specific about it? Which cases of reasoning are the correct ones and why? I take as my starting point the views on reasoning presented by the logicians and philosophers belonging to the analytic philosophy of language and epistemology, especially to the Polish analytic philosophy (The Lvov-Warsaw School: Tadeusz Czeżowski, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Janina Kotarbińska and Alfred Tarski). In addressing the above questions I develop an improved view according to which the formal conditions of correctness are based on formal relationships (a consequence etc.). Such conditions depend on informal (material) conditions of correctness which are based on informal (material) relationships (reference, causality, spatial relationships etc.).
