Reasoning: A Social Picture

Description: Anthony Simon Laden explores the kind of reasoning we engage in when we live together: when we are responsive to others and neither commanding nor deferring to them. He argues for a new, social picture of the activity of reasoning, in which reasoning is a species of conversation--social, ongoing, and governed by a set of characteristic norms.

Review Quotes: "This is a deeply thought and beautifully crafted book ... It offers a serious and substantial challenge to much contemporary thinking about reason in philosophy. But true to its ideal, Laden does not present it as a challenge but as an invitation to engage in some real reasoning about how we should understand the activity of reasoning."
--Contemporary Political Theory

"Laden's argument is extremely rich in content and introduces a wide range of novel arguments, making this book not only one of the most interesting recent additions to the literature about social conceptions of rationality, but also genuinely enjoyable to read ... it combines a great number of challenging ideas with an extraordinarily clear line of argument; it certainly will play a major role in the discussion of social theories of reasoning and deliberation. It is an important contribution which will put a number of questions on the philosophical agenda for some time to come."--Titus Stahl, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews