Ebook: Reasoning: Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations

What we have here, taken as a whole, represents an incredible achievement: an overarching anthology of 'state of the art' papers addressing the major issues in the field of logic and it's interface with the burgeoning scientific research into human cognition. Although the table of contents is not accessible on Amazon, it can and should be reviewed on CUP's website by any individual intending to invest money and time in this massive tome, for that investment must be substantial. Written by the usual suspects, highly regarded and paid expert scholars from the top universities in the occident, the book is weighty in every sense. Beginning with the basics, it requires some effort simply to remove it from the shelf and port it to a reading table. I do not pretend to have read the work in its entirety or to any extent approximating such an effort. In fact, I would challange anyone, even those imbued with the old-fashioned enlightment reverence for reason to complete a reading of "Reasoning" in an uninterupted, sustained series of readings. One would really have to be gung ho to do that to oneself.
I would further claim that it is more than likely that there are less 5,000 persons (you don't have to translate) in the world who could understand all that is written here, in its stated analyses and their implications, and in the highest probability, far less. By it's very inception, the project expressed here is somewhat, if not, decisively, exclusive. One must consider this observation, when one reads such advice as given above that one should have a knowledge of "introductory logic" before acquiring this volume. After all, most of us are interested in knowing more about reasoning and how to do it better. Folks, one needs a lot more than an "introductory" knowledge of logic before engaging the vast majority of papers in this book.
To be specific, let's take two of the contributors: Mark Sainsbury and the late, great Bernard Williams. Sainsbury writes here on paradox. He published a book on the subject years ago, widely circulated in academic circles. Sainsbury writes for the advanced student. There are many studies of aporetics, notably those of Rescher and, more recently, Sorenson, which explain the issues surrounding this important cognitive phenomenon in terms accessible to the common reader who has not been through the logic mills of St. Andrews, UCLA, or the equivalent. A similar observation could be made regarding every paper in the book: for the non-specialist, there are more accessible paths to understanding this information to be found elsewhere. Williams, whose oeuvre is dappled with brilliant, if not occasionally, monumental, insights, was regarded as equally often confusing and opaque in his writing by even his most adoring students, who regularly expressed their gratitude for the privilege of engaging him in conversation where he could readily explain the thicker passages in his arguments.
The upshot is that this encyclopediac pinnacle of scholarship will, as it should, proudly grace the shelf of many an institutional library, as a research tool. But beyond the select few who are involved in these debates diectly within the field, I expect it to be little read. While most of us enjoy a good day hike, or even a week's jaunt through a section of a moderately challenging mountain range, few, however admiringly we may look at it, would attempt Everest. And this problem, which emerges from our inherent limitations as a perceived self within a humanity, is indicative of the very crux of the downfall of the Enlightenment project as a whole: as with instantiations of strong AI, the more rationality replicates its own devices at increasingly rarified levels of refinement (or what it assumes to be refinements of understanding), the more irrational in its justifications it becomes. Or, to put it in the words or one of my introductory logic students who has the destiny of coming of age at the most challenging moment for the survival of the human race, "After a while, don't this stuff just give you a headache??"