2025 Vol. 16 №1

“When life was in the home circle” in the conditional reasonings of Fregean mad-humans and logical penalists

DOI

10.5922/2225-5346-2025-1-8

Pages

125-139

Abstract

We advocate an idea that a necessary condition for a dispute about truth amounts not to the carriers of non-ideal logical thought, but to a variety of approaches to reconstructing the logical form of conditional reasoning, which implies diversification of methods for solving logical tasks. The relevance of the study is conveyed by discussions about logical aliens - fan­tastic mad-humans, in which Frege embodied his idea of the impossibility of denying the nec­essary nature of logical laws in the acquisition of truth, in the context of the remarkable diver­sity of formal logical tools for modeling argumentation and reasoning. Based on modern stud­ies of conditional reasoning, using the example of Onegin’s conditional reasoning from a let­ter to Tatyana, we show that there are different ways of reconstructing it, including compet­ing ones. In the spirit of Frege, we construct the concept of logical penalists - non-ideal think­ers of our “home circle”, who, due to their limited intellectual resources, are sometimes con­tent with not the best results in reasoning and who turn out to be the only candidates to par­ticipate in a dispute about truth, as such disputes are possible with neither ideal thinkers nor logical aliens. The concept of logical penalists allows us to illustrate the idea that disputes are possible due not to the differences in opinions among humans, but to the variety of ways to justify them.

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