An Introduction to the Special Issue on Logic, Cognition and Argumentation

Abstract

In recent years we have witnessed a cognitive or ‘practical’ turn in logic [Gabbay and Woods, 2005; Urbański, 2011]. The most fundamental claim of its proponents is that logic has much to say about actual reasoning and argumentation. This cognitively-orientated logic. It acquires a new task of “systematically keeping track of changing representations of information” [van Benthem, 2008, p. 73], and, due to all the achievements of the mathematisation of logic, is fully up to this task. It also contests the claim that distinction between a descriptive and a normative account of the analysis of reasoning is disjoint and exhaustive [Gabbay and Woods, 2003, p. 37].