Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science

In Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science, Keith Stenning andMichiel van Lambalgen--a cognitive scientist and a logician--argue for the indispensability ofmodern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. Logic and cognition were once closelyconnected, they write, but were "divorced" in the past century; the psychology ofdeduction went from being central to the cognitive revolution to being the subject of widespreadskepticism about whether human reasoning really happens outside the academy. Stenning and vanLambalgen argue that logic and reasoning have been separated because of a series of unwarrantedassumptions about logic. Stenning and van Lambalgen contend that psychology cannot ignore processesof interpretation in which people, wittingly or unwittingly, frame problems for subsequentreasoning. The authors employ a neurally implementable defeasible logic for modeling part of thisframing process, and show how it can be used to guide the design of experiments and interpretresults.

Keith Stenning is Professor of Human Communication in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. Michiel van Lambalgen is Professor of Logic and Cognitive Science at the University of Amsterdam.