Luz Christopher Seiberth (University of Potsdam): "Arguments as Vehicles for the Space of Intelligence"

Title: Arguments as Vehicles for the Space of Intelligence

Abstract

Despite an uncanny attractiveness of the metaphor of the space of reason, we lack a unifying account of its explanatory power. In this talk, I present a logical sequencing model that treats rational inquiry as navigation through argumentative space. Building on recent work in complexity theory, argument analysis and adaptive rationality, I model giving and asking for reasons as operations on a hypergraph. Treating intellectual positions as argumentative achievements defined by simultaneous modal and deontic responsibility thus reveals what I call their nodal affordance—the inferential trajectories a position makes available. From this perspective, highly restrictive frameworks like structural realism achieve explanatory leverage precisely through their austerity: they compress expansive unfoldability into economical structures. On the logical sequencing model, explanatory power derives not from static representation, but from the trajectories arguments afford as vehicles across the space of intelligence.

Speaker

Luz Christopher Seiberth is Assistant Professor of Logic and Argument Theory at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He is the author of Intentionality in Sellars (Routledge 2022), co-editor of Reading Kant with Sellars (Routledge 2024) and Fraught with Ought (OUP, forthcoming). He is also convener of the International Sellars Colloquium and the Hegel Kreis Berlin.

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