Tracking Reason

Download or read book Tracking Reason written by Jody Azzouni and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When ordinary people--mathematicians among them--take something to follow (deductively) from something else, they are exposing the backbone of our self-ascribed ability to reason. Jody Azzouni investigates the connection between that ordinary notion of consequence and the formal analogues invented by logicians. One claim of the book is that, despite our apparent intuitive grasp of consequence, we do not introspect rules by which we reason, nor do we grasp the scope and range of the domain, as it were, of our reasoning. This point is illustrated with a close analysis of a paradigmatic case of ordinary reasoning: mathematical proof.