Rough plan: about half the sessions on each of two parts, as indicated below, with emphasis on the bits in bold. The main reading for the first part will be Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic, supplemented by some of his later articles and a few pieces by others (e.g., Jeff Horty). If you want a sense of the issues that will come up, apart from discussion of how arithmetic is related to logic, see this essay on Logical Form. If you want a sense of the studies that I have in mind under (2d), go here; though I hope to have some new data to report on by that point in the fall.
As you might expect from the highlighted bits, part of the goal is to compare and contrast (at least) two different notions of analysis: one that is explicitly offered as a normative proposal, connected to logic, as opposed to any claim about ordinary human psychology; and one that is explicitly offered as an empirical hypothesis about certain animals, drawing on various branches of cognitive science, as opposed to a claim about ideal thinkers. But the assumption will not be that these are entirely distinct enterprises, or that there are no other notions of analysis worth thinking about. On the contrary, these will be topics of discussion and possible paper topics. My hope is that some of the broader questions can be clarified by focusing on specific case studies where our ignorance, regarding the relevant norms and facts, is less extensive than usual. I have had queries about whether there will be a Zoom feed for auditors. For various reasons, I’m inclined to not have the Rutgers seminar be hybrid in this way. But if there is sufficient interest from people who can’t attend the live sessions, I’m open to the possibility of doing an informal and slightly condensed zoom version late some afternoon. I did something like this in the fall of 2020, rerunning a variant of a Rutgers seminar from the previous spring; see here. That turned out to be a lot of fun. If you would be interested in this,