Tracking Reason Proof, Consequence, and Truth

When ordinary people--mathematicians among them--take something to follow (deductively) from something else, they are exposing the backbone of our self-ascribed ability to reason. Jody Azzouni investigates the connection between that ordinary notion of consequence and the formal analoguesinvented by logicians. One claim of the book is that, despite our apparent intuitive grasp of consequence, we do not introspect rules by which we reason, nor do we grasp the scope and range of the domain, as it were, of our reasoning. This point is illustrated with a close analysis of a paradigmaticcase of ordinary reasoning: mathematical proof.

Jody Azzouni is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He also the author of Deflating Existential Consequence (OUP 2004).