Abstract

This essay attempts to clarify the project of explaining the possibility of ‘blind reasoning’—namely, of basic logical inferences to which we are entitled without our having an explicit justification for them. The role played by inferentialism in this project is examined and objections made to inferentialism by Paolo Casalegno and Timothy Williamson are answered. Casalegno proposes a recipe for formulating a counterexample to any proposed constitutive inferential role by imaging a subject who understands the logical constant in question but fails to have the capacity to make the inference in question; Williamson’s recipe turns on imagining an expert who continues to understand the constant in question while having developed sophisticated considerations for refusing to make it. It’s argued that neither recipe succeeds.