Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science

Abstract

A new proposal for integrating the employment of formal and empirical methods in the study of human reasoning. In Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science, Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen—a cognitive scientist and a logician—argue for the indispensability of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. Logic and cognition were once closely connected, they write, but were “divorced” in the past century; the psychology of deduction went from being central to the cognitive revolution to being the subject of widespread skepticism about whether human reasoning really happens outside the academy. Stenning and van Lambalgen argue that logic and reasoning have been separated because of a series of unwarranted assumptions about logic. Stenning and van Lambalgen contend that psychology cannot ignore processes of interpretation in which people, wittingly or unwittingly, frame problems for subsequent reasoning. The authors employ a neurally implementable defeasible logic for modeling part of this framing process, and show how it can be used to guide the design of experiments and interpret results. Bradford Books imprint

Human Rationality Challenges Universal Logic

“…Schütz's analysis shows that the logical explication of human rationality involves a far more sweeping notion of the set of consequences than a superficial analysis might suggest. It is echoed in critiques of experimental studies of human rationality that note that the subjects being studied have different perspectives on the situation than the experimenters intend, and that this may explain their apparent irrationality from the experimenter's point of view [213]. However, the behavior is still amenable to logical analysis if the set of possible consequences being considered can be identified.…”

“…A range of subsequent experiments with similar material have shown a wide range of phenomena, for example, that people do arrive at the correct solution if the problem is presented in different forms [213] and that even young children can arrive at the correct solution through extensive peer discussion [174]. It appears that the source of errors lies not in problems with logical reasoning but rather with those of interpreting the instructions in the terms intended by the experimenters.…”

Logic and Reasoning: do the facts matter?

“…But there is also an established tradition acknowledging that the rules of the core calculus cannot be tested separately from the choice made by the subjects of a probabilistic model for the situation they imagine themselves to be in. The analogue for this in the case of logical reasoning would be a careful study of formal options for choosing and managing qualitative models -as provided in the re-examination of the Wason Card Task in [23]. But cf.…”

“…In some 150 pages, this volume contains a surprising set of contributions on belief revision, default reasoning, numerical reasoning, natural language interpretation, conditional reasoning, and cognitive evolution, with extensive connections between logic, linguistics, game theory, and cognitive psychology and brain research. 23 An illustration: logic and intelligent interaction The above set of issues may seem like a mere wish-list of things to be done, and then probably by others. But many of these themes occur concretely in current research on dynamic logics for information flow and games, an area which I am involved in myself.…”

My beliefs about your beliefs: a case study in theory of mind and epistemic logic

“…This is a theoretical definition, but it is not hard to conceive of circumstances in which it would be justified. A member of one culture encountering members of 1 A logical alternative to assume a ToM deficiency in autistic agents is provided in Stenning and van Lambalgen (2006) and van Lambalgen and Smid (2003). There, autism is seen as an executive dysfunction, which is operationalized by the autistic agent's inability to apply reasoning with exception handling, under circumstances where closed-world assumptions apply.…”