Catarina Dutilh Novaes, "The Dialogical Roots of Deduction: Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on Reasoning" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
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What is the opening premise about the “obvious” syllogism and why does it matter?
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Hello and thanks for joining us for this episode of New Books in Philosophy, which is part of the New Books Network. I'm Robert Talise, I'm professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University. I co-host the program with Carrie Figder, Malcolm Keating, and Sarah Tyson. My guest today is Katerina Dutil Novis. Katerina is professor of philosophy and university research chair at Rye University Amsterdam. She's also a pro professorial fellow at RK at the University of St Andrew. Katerina specializes in the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of mathematics, including the history of logic and argumentation theory. In addition to all that, she also pursues work in social epistemology, philosophical psychology, and political philosophy.
Her new book has just been published with Cambridge University Press. It's titled The Dialogical Roots of Deduction Historical, Cognitive, and Philosophical Perspectives on Reasoning. Now, if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then it must be that Socrates is mortal. What could be more obvious than that? Well, sometimes obviousness serves to conceal difficulties, um and there's a lot more going on in this simple deduction than we often recognize. For one thing, we're not being asked to assess whether all men indeed are mortal. Nor are we asking whether Socrates is indeed a man when we're running this inference. Instead, we're focusing on the logical relation that obtains between those two claims and the third, namely that Socrates is mortal.
We claim that the third statement follows from. The combination or conjunction of the first two. Or that the third is entailed. by the combination or conjunction of the first two. But what's that? How does that work? Uh seems like magic, doesn't it? Um so despite the obviousness of so deduction, um there are all kinds of philosophical questions um that need addressing. And in her new book, uh, Katerina argues that deduction arises out of practices of dialogue. Now, as usual, there's a lot to talk about, but we should also begin, as we normally do, with our author and guest. Hi, Katharina, how are you?
Hi, Bob, thanks for having me.
Thank you for joining us on New Books in Philosophy. Um so we we usually ask uh the author to begin uh you know start us off with uh uh telling us a bit about uh themselves. So uh can you tell us a bit about yourself, Caterina?
Sure. Well so I was born and raised in Brazil. I actually also spent two years of my uh uh teen years in high school in France. And uh so yeah, so that's basically where uh, you know, I I was formed as a as a person, uh right between Brazil and France. And also in France, in these two years in France, this is really where my love for mathematics first emerged.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the opening premise about the “obvious” syllogism and why does it matter?
0:00–5:40
2
How does Catarina Dutilh Novaes introduce her background and the motivation for her new book?
5:40–12:08
3
What are the three core features of deduction that the book identifies?
12:08–24:17
4
How does the dialogical prover‑skeptic model explain necessary truth‑preservation, perspicuity, and neutrality?
24:17–36:20
5
Why does the author argue that deduction has historical roots in ancient Greek dialogue and later traditions?
36:20–51:12
6
What does the book say about the normativity of logic and its relevance to multi‑agent dialogue?
51:12–1:01:38
7
How do empirical studies of human reasoning support a dialogical view of deduction?
1:01:38–1:02:59
Speakers
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