Contents
I Groundwork 1
1 Introduction: Logic and Psychology 3
1.1 Forms of Rationality 4
1.2 How Logic and Cognition Got Divorced 8
1.3 Two Philosophers on the Certainty of Logic: Frege and
Husserl 9
1.3.1 Frege’s Idealism in Logic 10
1.3.2 Husserl as a Forerunner of Semantics 12
1.4 What the Reader May Expect 15
2 The Anatomy of Logic 19
2.1 How Not to Think about Logical Reasoning 20
2.2 Reasoning to an Interpretation as Parameter Setting 20
2.2.1 Classical Propositional Logic 25
2.2.2 Truth–Functionality without Bivalence 27
2.2.3 A Domain in which Bivalence is Truly Ridiculous 28
2.3 The Many Faces of Closed–World Reasoning 33
2.3.1 Closed–World Reasoning, More Formally 33
2.3.2 Unknown Preconditions 34
2.3.3 Causal and Counterfactual Reasoning 38
2.3.4 Attribution of Beliefs and Intentions 39
3 A Little Logic Goes a Long Way 43
3.1 The Mother of All Reasoning Tasks 44
3.2 A Preliminary Logical Distinction 46
3.3 Logical Forms in Reasoning 49
3.4 Logical Forms in the Selection Task 52
3.4.1 The Big Divide: Descriptive and Deontic
Conditionals 53
3.5 Giving Subjects a Voice 59
3.5.1 The Design of the Tutorial Experiment:
High-Energy Phenomenology 61
3.5.2 Subjects’ Understanding of Truth and Falsity 63
3.5.3 Dependencies between Card Choices 70
3.5.4 The Pragmatics of the Descriptive Selection Task. 74
3.5.5 Interaction between Interpretation and Reasoning 75
3.5.6 Subjects’ Understanding of Propositional
Connectives 80
3.6 Matching Bias: the “No-Processing” Explanation 86
3.7 The Subject’s Predicament 87
3.8 Conclusion 90
4 From Logic via Exploration to Controlled Experiment 93
4.1 Designing Experiments Following Observations 95
4.1.1 Conditions: Classical “Abstract” Task 95
4.1.2 Conditions: Two–Rule Task 95
4.1.3 Conditions: Contingency Instructions 96
4.1.4 Conditions: Judging Truthfulness of an
Independent Source 97
4.1.5 Conditions: Exploring Other Kinds of Rules than
Conditionals 99
4.1.6 Subjects 99
4.1.7 Method 99
4.1.8 Results 100
4.2 Discussion of Results 101
4.2.1 The Two–Rule Task 102
4.2.2 Contingency Instructions 105
4.2.3 Truthfulness Instructions 107
4.2.4 The Conjunctive Rule 107
4.2.5 Putting It All Together? 110
4.3 What Does This Say about Reasoning More Generally? 112
5 From the Laboratory to the Wild and Back Again 117
5.1 The Laboratory 117
5.1.1 Mental Logic 118
5.1.2 Mental Models 119
5.1.3 Darwinian Algorithms 120
5.1.4 Cold Water 120
5.2 A View with No Room 121
5.3 The Literate Wild 124
5.3.1 The Literate Wild: System 1 Processes 125
5.3.2 The Literate Wild: System 2 Processes 128
5.3.3 The Relation between System 1 and System 2 130
5.4 The Illiterate Wild 130
5.4.1 Excursion: Electroconvulsive Therapy and
Syllogistic Reasoning 134
6 The Origin of Human Reasoning Capacities 139
6.1 Crude Chronology 140
6.2 Evolutionary Thinking: From Biology to Evolutionary
Psychology 142
6.2.1 Analogy and Disanalogy with Language 143
6.2.2 Innateness 143
6.2.3 Adaptationism and its Discontents 145
6.2.4 Massive Modularity 148
6.3 What Evolutionary Psychology Has to Say about
Reasoning 152
6.3.1 Reassessing Cheater Detection 153
6.3.2 Why Cheater Detection Is Claimed to Override
Logical Form 155
6.3.3 Altruism 156
6.3.4 The Moral, Part 1: The Problem of Phenotypic
Description 157
6.3.5 The Moral, Part 2: What’s so Special about
Logical Reasoning 159
6.4 Modularity with a Human Face 160
6.4.1 Planning: Continuities with Our Ancestors 161
6.4.2 Discontinuities 163
6.5 Out of the Mouths of Babes and Sucklings 164
6.5.1 Altriciality and Social Behavior 165
6.5.2 Altriciality and Neurogenesis 167
6.5.3 Altriciality in the Evolution of Homo 169
6.6 Conclusion: Back to the Laboratory (and the Drawing
Board) 170
II Modeling 173
7 Planning and Reasoning: The Suppression Task 177
7.1 The Suppression Task and Byrne’s Interpretation 180
7.2 Logical Forms in the Suppression Task 183
7.2.1 Logic Programming and Planning: Informal
Introduction 185
7.2.2 Logic Programming and Planning Formally 186
7.2.3 Strengthening the Closed–World Assumption:
Integrity Constraints 189
7.2.4 Constructing Models 192
7.3 How Closed–World Reasoning Explains Suppression 195
7.3.1 The Forward Inferences: MP and DA 196
7.3.2 The Backward Inferences: MT and AC 200
7.3.3 Summary 202
7.4 Data from Tutorial Dialogues 203
7.4.1 Suppression of MP Exists 204
7.4.2 Evidence for the Involvement of Closed–World
Reasoning in Suppression 205
7.4.3 Is there a Role for Classical Logic? 207
7.4.4 Nonsuppression Comes in Different Flavors 208
7.4.5 Different Roles of the Second Conditional 209
7.4.6 Suppression is Relative to Task Setup 211
7.4.7 The Consistent Subject: a Mythical Beast? 212
7.5 Probabilities Don’t Help as Much as Some Would Like 213
8 Implementing Reasoning in Neural Networks 217
8.1 Closed–World Reasoning and Neural Nets 218
8.2 From Logic Programs to Recurrent Neural Networks 222
8.2.1 Positive Programs 222
8.2.2 Definite Programs 225
8.3 Backward Reasoning and Closed–World Reasoning for
Rules 231
8.4 Constructing the Nets 232
8.4.1 Fast Functional Links 232
8.4.2 Between the Sheets 234
8.5 A Hidden Layer of Abnormalities 235
8.6 Discussion 237
9 Coping with Nonmonotonicity in Autism 241
9.1 Psychological Theories of Autism 242
9.1.1 Theory of Mind 242
9.1.2 Affective Foundation 243
9.1.3 Weak Central Coherence 244
9.1.4 Executive Disorder 245
9.2 Logic and Experiment in the Study of Psychiatric Disorders 246
9.3 Theory of Mind and Reasoning 248
9.4 Reasoning in the False Belief Task 249
9.4.1 Formal Language and Principles 251
9.4.2 Closed–World Reasoning in the Normal Child
Older Than 4 Years 253
9.4.3 Attribution of Beliefs and Closed–World
Reasoning in the Younger or Autistic Child 254
9.4.4 Reasoning in an Unexpected Contents Task 255
9.4.5 What This Analysis of the Child’s Reasoning Tells
Us 257
9.5 Counterfactual Reasoning 259
9.6 Executive Dysfunction and the Box Task 262
9.6.1 Closed–World Reasoning in the Box Task 264
9.6.2 The Suppression Task as a Formal Analogue of the
Box Task 266
9.7 Autists’ Performance in the Suppression Task 267
9.8 Dialogue Data 269
9.8.1 Excerpts from Dialogues: MP 270
9.8.2 Excerpts from Dialogues: MT 270
9.8.3 Excerpts from Dialogues: AC 272
9.9 A Similar Task with very Different Outcomes 272
9.9.1 The ‘A not B’ Task 274
9.10 Summing up the Cognitive Analyses 276
9.11 The Biological Setting of Autism 279
9.11.1 Brain Development and Implementations of
Closed–World
Reasoning 282
9.11.2 The Genetics of Autism and Parental Resource
Allocation 288
10 Syllogisms and Beyond 297
10.1 Putting It All Back Together 297
10.2 What is the Syllogistic Task? 298
10.2.1 Syntax 299
10.2.2 Semantics 299
10.3 Euler Circles 301
10.3.1 Strategies for Combining Diagrams 303
10.3.2 Metalogical Considerations 306
10.4 Individual Differences in Interpretation 309
10.4.1 Immediate Inferences and the Understanding of
Deductive Tasks 310
10.4.2 A New Experiment on Immediate Inference 312
10.5 Syllogistic Reasoning 316
10.5.1 Individual Factors Influencing Reasoning 317
10.5.2 Statistical analysis 318
10.5.3 From Data Description to a Psychological Model 319
10.5.4 Incorporating Interpretation Factors into the
Reasoning Model 323
10.6 Mental Models 331
10.6.1 Experimental Evidence 331
10.6.2 What Is a Mental Model? 332
10.6.3 The “Algorithm” of the Mental Models Theory 332
10.6.4 Predictions 338
10.6.5 Conclusion: The Logic of Mental Models 339
10.6.6 Morals from Syllogisms? 341
III Is Psychology Hard or
Impossible? 343
11 Rationality Revisited 347
11.1 Logic and Information–Processing 347
11.1.1 Information Processing 348
11.1.2 Logic as Information–Processing 350
11.1.3 On Why We are Not Postmodern Relativists 352
11.1.4 Logic as Information Extraction: Examples 352
11.1.5 Some Information–Processing is Best Viewed as
Logic 354
11.1.6 Nonmonotonic Logic and the
Competence/Performance Distinction 355
11.2 The Bottom Line 356
11.2.1 Subjects and Experiments 357
11.2.2 Homo sapiens sapiens 365
Bibliography 367
Citation Index 391
General Index 397
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