Development and necessary norms of reasoning

The question of whether reasoning can, or should, be described by a single normative model is an important one. In the following, I combine epistemological considerations taken from Piaget’s notion of genetic epistemology, a hypothesis about the role of reasoning in communication and developmental data to argue that some basic logical principles are in fact highly normative. I argue here that explicit, analytic human reasoning, in contrast to intuitive reasoning, uniformly relies on a form of validity that allows distinguishing between valid and invalid arguments based on the existence of counterexamples to conclusions.