| Summary: | Written in honour of the late Academician Georg Brutian, the paper draws attention on one of the most special means of the transformative logic, the corrective argumentation, called here reasoning, that better emphasises the specific of arguments as such: that to inform semantically about the intention to arrive to certain conclusions. The corrective reasoning is that which reviews not only the validity of inferences, but also of the different types of premises lying at the basis of the theories people erect about every moment and aspect of life and reality. The corrective reasoning is the form of the capacity to critique the former judgements and has three tiers: the first – concluding that the former/existing theory was proven to be wrong; the second – gathering the arguments of alternative theories, and the third – focusing on the best/or even only in present the more economical alternative theory.
Every tier has more strata of reasoning whose result is the correction: the conclusion that 1) the old results (and focus on examples/situations), so the old theories require/directly send to their refutation, and 2) the conclusion suggests just some arguments of alternative theories. The corrective argumentation is not reduced to propositions, neither to syllogisms, but is constituted of the many relationships between statements.
From all the domains the corrective argumentation does manifest within and about, the scientific one was chose just because here the corrective approach is compulsory and its pattern – the most obvious. An epistemological analysis was deployed and it was demonstrated that the goal of the corrective reasoning is truth (in a certain concrete temporal interval) and the way to it involves the better understanding of the semantic level of language and its dependence on the real world.
Because the corrective reasoning is a question of daring and imagining new theories, the mechanism of this process was sketched by showing that consciousness has not only a passive face (that of representations) but always an active one too (the intention toward the external world), and by focusing on the logical forms as structures of thinking and their relationships with the external world “through the medium of” their internal consistence and coherence. In its turn, argumentation has in view both the formal model and substantial model of situations.
The specific of the corrective reasoning in science shows the difficulty of this endeavour and some deviations from this specific. The conclusion is that, indeed, the corrective reasoning is revolutionary.
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