Title : In two minds? Because we need two logics
Abstract:
This is a cautionary tale about disciplinary allergies: a sorry tale from the psychology of reason-ing literature rejecting logic. Understanding a very little logic can be a great boost to empirical investiga-tions. Our goal here is to interest related disciplines in a major shift for empirical work on classical logical reasoning. Logically `naive' participants have been convicted of not understanding classical logic when in truth the Ex-perimenters have not understood how their instructions are interpreted. When put in an unambiguously suit-able context, participants suddenly become quite good at classical logical reasoning, even using some of its horrors to construct their own example countermodels. These properties are routinely used to dismiss any relevance of logic to the psychology of human reasoning. As a control, instructed as the literature does, our participants are just like those from the literature. Worse still, there are already published examples of reasoning in this `right context' (of dispute) which show `classical reasoning' but are not recognised as such. For example, the field simultaneously asserts that partic-ipants are rather good at `simple syllogistic counterexample reasoning’, without acknowledging this just is a semantic presentation of classical logic. Lacking a logical map to guide them, they do not recognise when participants' logic changes, or doesn't. There are in fact two contrasting logics (`narrative' and classical). With a good map, the data shows that supposedly `logically naive' participants in constructing their coun-terexamples actually exploit the very features of classical logic that would be absurd in the participants’ un-derstanding of the conventional tasks. This upending of the accepted facts points to a range of little explored empirical questions. Both these logics (narrative and classical) are probably largely implicit in these participants: they demonstrably come up with the right output, but they do not have much explicit access to how they reason (Stenning, K., & van Lam-balgen, M. 2022). For narrative reasoning a nonmonotonic logic has been shown to explain the crucial semantic memory re-trieval problem through a neural symbolic network that can be the basis of the huge size of semantic memo-ry, its rapidity of use, sensitivity to exceptions, and the outlines of `reasoning by retrieval’ (Stenning, K., & van Lambalgen, M. 2008), and also how such reasoning can be implicit. The work on implicitness shows that illiterate participants can in fact engage this logic with far greater success than they have been credited with. When it comes to disorders, we have presented evidence that mildly autistic participants' discourse process-ing of narrative bears the hallmarks expected from their brain's deficiencies in processing negation (Sten-ning, K., & van Lambalgen, M. 2007; Pijnacker, J. et al. 2009; Pijnacker, J. et al. 2010). ADHD participants show different abnormalities, explicable by their different problems with executive func-tion (van Lambalgen, M., van Kruistum, C., & Parigger, E. 2008). These are `brain symptoms' of rea-soning with narrative logic. For classical logic, the findings presented here are new, relatively undeveloped, and open up widespread em-pirical questions. What implicit knowledge do participants access in what contexts to achieve this classical reasoning? How do those contexts combine with their mental machinery to produce this compliance with the logics? We would like to engage this audience with how classical logical reasoning is exhibited in mind and brain disorders. And don't forget how this reanalysis changes our view of how naive logicians' abilities are transformed by learning/teaching. Instead of bizarre new languages from outer space, logics become regu-larisations. And makings explicit, of what is already known implicitly. References: Pijnacker, J., Geurts, B., van Lambalgen, M., Buitelaar, J., & Hagoort, P. (2010). Reasoning with exceptions: An event-related brain potentials study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(2), 471–480. Pijnacker, J., Geurts, B., Van Lambalgen, M., Kan, C. C., Buitelaar, J. K., & Ha-goort, P. (2009). Defeasible reasoning in high-functioning adults with autism: Evi-dence for impaired exception-handling. Neuropsychologia, 47(3), 644–651. Stenning, K., & van Lambalgen, M. (2007). Logic in the study of psychiatric dis-orders: Executive function and rule-following. Topoi , 26 (1), 97– 114. (Special issue on Logic and Cognitive Science) Stenning, K., & van Lambalgen, M. (2008). Human reasoning and cognitive sci-ence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Stenning, K., & van Lambalgen, M. (2022). Reinterpreting dual process models of implicit human reasoning: separate logics for reasoning to and from interpreta-tions. In R. Thompson (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Implicit Cognition. Routledge. van Lambalgen, M., van Kruistum, C., & Parigger, E. (2008). Discourse process-ing in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Journal of Logic, Lan-guage and Information, 17, 467–487.
What will the audience learn from your presentation?
- What is important about logic for psychology and the brain is not firstly the intri-cate technical details, but the broad aims of the discipline: to provide a qualitative mathematics’ of reasoning, especially of contrasting goals of reasoning.
- Logics are highly abstract, but they can define specific distinguishing features of contrasting discourses. Narrative, and classical dispute, contrast in their top-level goals: producing new interpretations vs. disputing whether particular proposed in-terpretations are coherent.
- Mental disorders can be traced to features of the implementations of these logics: differences in processing exceptions in autism; achieving continuity in ADHD •Naive classical logical reasoning is about dispute between parties, as opposed to narrative’s goal of cooperative communication.
- This broadens the evidence base: qualitative differences in function provide strong evidence of underlying brain implementations.
- This audience knows the most plausible candidates for study better than we do
