Susan Stebbing’s logical interventionism
Date
01/03/2021Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
We examine a contribution L. Susan Stebbing made to the understanding of critical thinking and its relation to formal logic. Stebbing took expertise in formal logic to authorise logical intervention in public debate, specifically in assessing of the validity of everyday reasoning. She held, however, that formal logic is purely the study of logical form. Given the problems of ascertaining logical form in any particular instance, and that logical form does not always track informal validity, it is difficult to see how she could justify her belief in logical interventionism. Her answer to this problem is the contribution we explore here. It involves the view that although the logician’s expertise is not sufficient to assess arguments made in everyday contexts on its own, it nevertheless plays a unique role in giving systematicity and direction to the critique of such arguments, in particular, in public debate.
Citation
X. Douglas , A & Nassim , J 2021 , ' Susan Stebbing’s logical interventionism ' , History and Philosophy of Logic , vol. Latest Articles . https://doi.org/10.1080/01445340.2021.1883381
Publication
History and Philosophy of Logic
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0144-5340Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1080/01445340.2021.1883381
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.