Dr Corine Besson | University of Sussex
Corine Besson is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sussex and Director of the Centre for Logic and Language at the Institute of Philosophy, University of London. Her principal areas of research are epistemology, the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of language.
Date | 22 October 2025
Title | 'Rule-Following, Particularism and The Particular-First View of Deductive Reasoning'
Abstract:
The standard view of deductive reasoning has it that it requires rule-following: if someone reasons deductively, they follow a general rule that guides their reasoning.
This view is open to many challenges, but one worry is that if it were to be false that we follow general rules in reasoning, a kind of logical particularism would have to be true. I argue that this is not the case and sketch an account of deductive reasoning, which I call ‘Particular-First’, that is a rival to both rule-following and particularism.