LSE is pleased to announce the winner of the 2022 Lakatos Award.

The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) is pleased to announce the winner of the 2022 Lakatos Award, which goes to Catarina Dutilh Novaes for her book The Dialogical Roots of Deduction (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

The Lakatos Award was made possible by a generous endowment from the Latsis Foundation, in memory of the former LSE professor Imre Lakatos. It is administered by an international Management Committee, which is organised from the LSE but entirely independent of LSE’s Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. The Committee decides the outcome of the Award competition on the basis of advice from an anonymous panel of selectors who produce detailed reports on the shortlisted books.

The prize winner will receive their Award and deliver their prize lecture at the LSE at a time and location to be confirmed later. The lecture will be open to the public.

The Dialogical Roots of Deduction is praised by the Selectors as a “masterwork” that is “absolutely fascinating” and in which “we have a breath-taking amount of knowledge revealed”: “the knowledge is breath-taking, the argument original, and the whole is an intellectual feat”. The book “develops a coherent, compelling and broadly articulated account of large parts of human reasoning that has wide relevance to understanding science as a particular development of
human reason.” The book offers a “very intriguing, erudite, and potentially highly productive argument, namely that deduction is fundamentally a dialogical and collaborative phenomenon, and hence is not the outcome of individual activities based on rules or logic with reasoners in competition with each other, but instead should be viewed as a social activity.” In making this point, “the book clearly makes a very important contribution to our understandings of logic and mathematical reasoning”.