Rethinking logic. Logic in relation to mathematics, evolution, and method (Q1944232)

This book is a polemic against modern mathematical logic as a rigorous theory of deduction. The author promotes instead an alternative paradigm that sees logic as a heuristic for discovery, deriving hypotheses from problems by means of non-deductive rules of inference. The criterion of success of hypotheses is `plausibility' rather than truth, though the rules are neither plausibility nor truth preserving. Such logic includes both `natural' logic, which all organisms possess as part of their biology, and `artificial' logic such as humans might use to solve problems that is part of their cultural evolution. As described in the final two chapters, the non-deductive rules include reasoning by induction from one or more cases, inferences by analogy, as well as generalization, specialization, metaphor, definition, and diagrams. There is no systematic study of such rules, however, nor consideration of whether some rules might be more appropriate to certain purposes or situations than others.