Brumberg-Chaumont Julie and Rosental Claude (eds) (2021) Logical Skills: Social-Historical Perspectives

Abstract

Perspectives (2021) reveals that it is logic, broadly conceived, that joins together the disparate fields of postcolonial studies and disability studies. For postcolonial STS scholars, the book is of interest insofar as it shows how logic has served, at different moments in history, to define certain peoples as "primitive." For scholars of disability studies, the book provides historical examples of the use of logic to cast specific social groups-including children, the intellectually disabled, and the insane-as less than human. The contributors variously define logic both formally (as inductive and inferential, or deductive and syllogistic, or pragmatic and action-oriented) and informally (as common sense, or rationality, or the capacity for abstract thought, or the avoidance of contradiction, or native intelligence). Dominique Poirel (chapter 7) relates that what would later become the dominant definition of logic-dialectical reasoning-was once a contested terrain.The key message of the book is that the sociological study of the history of logic is a decolonizing move, one that reveals overlaps between colonization and the marginalization of the disabled. Again and again, the various contributors describe how logic was conceived of as "natural," by virtue of its inscription in the body, and yet restricted to the "civilized," the "learned," and the "sane." For example, Claude Blanckaert