International symposium
Cognition and Interpretation

Institute of philosophy,
Zagreb, October 10-11, 2003

Nenad Smokrović (Rijeka)
Normativism vs. descriptivism in explaining logical abilities

In this paper I am formulating the theoretical position of cognitive logicism as a view claiming that a person’s reasoning (deductive or theoretical) is based on and guided by the possession of some logical abilities. This position can be further articulated and defended on two main foundations, each resting on a distinct theoretical tradition, normativist and descriptivist. The two positions I am labelling, respectively, as normativism-logicism and descriptivism-logicism.
A very important feature of logical abilities is their universality. Regarding the feature of universality, there is, among the people tackling with the issue, a firmly established methodological view that only normativistic, a priori determination of logical abilities can guarantee their universality, while empirical, a posteriori descriptivist approach is not able to do that. This view establish the dilemma: Either you can have normativism that, with an unavoidable degree of idealization, will provide universality, or, you can have empirical descriptivism ending up in relativism. I will call this view the thesis of normative exclusiveness.
In this paper I am claiming that the thesis of normative exclusiveness is false. My aim is to show that descriptivism can: a) offer results equivalent to normativism, and b) that descriptivism can guarantee a sufficient degree of universality. From (a) and (b) I am going to argue for the thesis that normativist accounting for logical abilities is, perhaps, correct but redundant.