Communalis - Communication and Natural Logic International Society was founded in 2009 in Switzerland, at the University of Neuchâtel, and registered in 2015 as a Canadian international research society in Montreal, Quebec. The goal of the founders - Milton N. Campos, Emilio Gattico, Jean-Blaise Grize and Denis Miéville - was one of integrating research centres interested in studies bridging communication, argumentation and natural logic from a constructivist perspective, in line with the genetic and critical epistemological tradition.
Natural logic has been a topic of interest since the Greeks, and many scholars have tried to unveil the relationships between logic and the mind across millennia. Although many different kinds of logic were conceived to account for the way we naturally think, natural logic as it stands today was developed with the goal of analyzing schematizations, i.e. communication situations in which representations generated by peoples’ mental operations are shared and co-constructed through argumentation. Natural logic was conceived to bring together the logic of forms and that of content, in order to go beyond the Piagetian model of operatory logic. It is a logical theory, but it could also be considered a method suitable for the study of communication and argumentation situations from the human and social sciences perspectives.
Conceived by Jean-Blaise Grize, natural logic was further developed thanks to the contributions of collaborators of the Semiological Research Centre of the University of Neuchâtel. Among the collaborators who contributed most to the development and refinement of natural logic we find Denis Miéville and Marie-Jeanne Borel.