Review of Errors of Reasoning. Naturalizing the Logic of Inference, by John Woods

John Woods’ Errors of Reasoning (EoR) flies in the face of logical orthodoxy in an astonishing number of ways. Its 550 pages make numerous claims on a great many subjects. Due to space limitations, this review will focus only on some of them. I nevertheless hope to give the general flavour of this thought-provoking book. The official core topic of EoR is the one of logical fallacies. And the core claim is a critical one: the traditional theory of fallacies is radically wrong. But the background for this bold negative statement is a sophisticated and highly revisionary philosophical view of human reasoning. Such a view, it seems to me, is the most interesting aspect of the book, its critique of traditional fallacy theory being, in a sense, but its main local application. I will begin by explaining the gist of Woods’ critical claim on fallacies. I will then explore the background approach inspiring Woods’ stance, which occupies, roughly, EoR’s first half. Finally, I will give an example of the strategies used by Woods to substantiate the critical claim via the background view. The heart of Woods’ critique lies in what he calls the concept-list misalignment thesis (p. 6). He identifies a mainstream concept of logical fallacy and a list of items traditionally labelled as fallacies. He then shows via a detailed case-by-case investigation how most of the items in the list do not belong in the extension of the concept. As for the targeted concept, it is called the EAUI (read it as ‘Yowee’: p. 135) concept of logical fallacy: fallacies are Errors of reasoning, which are Attractive to reasoners (in that they easily fall prey of them), Universal (i.e., extremely common) and Incorrigible (even after the given fallacy’s fallacious nature has been explained to the reasoner, s/he is still prone to commit it). As for the list considered in EoR, it includes traditional deductive and inductive fallacies like ad baculum, ad hominem, ad populum, ad ignorantiam, ad verecundiam, affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent, hasty generalization, equivocation or quaternio terminorum, the gambler’s fallacy and post hoc ergo propter hoc. The EAUI conception gives a conjunctive characterization, so Woods has a disjunctive task: of each targeted (would-be-)fallacy, show that, contrary to tradition, it is either not attractive, or not universal, or not incorrigible—or, not an error. This last bit takes us to Woods’ second, possibly even more interesting claim on fallacies after concept-list misalignment: EoR’s cognitive virtue thesis (p. 7) has it that most of the traditional fallacies should not be labelled as errors, but are, on the contrary, virtuous ways of reasoning. Now one expects what Lewis called ‘incredulous stares’: how can denying the antecedent or ad ignorantiam not be logical mistakes? There is no way for ‘If A then B’ and not-A to entail not-B, or for ‘There’s no evidence that not-A’ to entail A, in any logically decent sense of ‘entail’. But according to Woods, much mainstream logic has got the standards of logical decency wrong: he calls, in fact, for a rethinking of what counts as error in human reasoning. The alternative view of reasoning and its errors proposed by Woods to substantiate his conceptlist misalignment and cognitive virtue theses is based on a broad and ambitious naturalization project, introduced in Chapter I and expanded to specific topics mostly in Chapters II to V. This is inspired by a number of traditions neglected or left under-developed within the mainstream 20th Century logic, ranging from naturalized epistemology to cognitive science and to some