How Can Fallacies Arise about Fallacies?

Abstract

A hundred years ago, even perhaps as recently as fifty years ago, progress would normally be made in experimental psychology, in formal logic, in philosophical analysis, in linguistic theory or in neurology, as if those were essentially distinct and independent subjects of enquiry. Moreover this standard feature of intellectual research was unhesitatingly endorsed by the structure of library catalogues, of university departments, of funding agencies and of professional journals. Even computer science was treated largely as just an ancillary to military codebreaking. But all these areas of research have now been absorbed and unified within the newly emerging ferment of ideas that has come to be known as cognitive science. So it is with the feeling of being on the crest of a wave in current scientific enquiry that we meet here at the 1997 International Colloquium on Cognitive Science which has been so efficiently organised by our joint hosts, the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information and the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science of the University of the Basque Country.