Introduction: Reasoning and Patterns of Rationality

This Introduction outlines aims and scope of the volume 'Reasoning, Rationality and Probability' (eds. M.C. Galavotti, R. Scazzieri and P. Suppes) and discusses its main unifying themes. In particular, the authors call attention to the recent emphasis of the literature on practical rationality upon the open-ended structure of rational arguments, and the active role of the human mind in developing conceptual tools suitable for problem solving under contingent sets of constraints. This pragmatic view of rationality is considered as conducive to a rigorous (formal) investigation of reasoning and deliberation. This is done by ‘moving backwards’ the good reasons for rational decisions to the structure of cognitive frames, and by associating the latter to the case-dependent utilization of cognitive abilities. In short, reasoning comes to be seen as a cognitive state in which a prior set of abilities (that we may take as relatively unstructured with respect to the problem situation at hand) takes a definite shape as shifts in context activate one cluster of cognitive procedures after another. In this way, rationality appears to be closely intertwined with a connectionist model of justified procedures. The identification of good reasons is situation-dependent, and latent connections are made operative by contingent states of the world.