Title: "What is it to know a logic? To understand the discourse it
specifies perhaps?"
Although there has been more than a century of experimental psychology
done on tasks which experimenters suppose to be understood by their
subjects as classical logical tasks, there are good arguments that
many of the subjects interpret these tasks in a nonmonotonic logic
(Stenning and van Lambalgen 2006). So what do subjects know of
classical logic? This talk proposes that the answer must lie in what
they understand about the discourse classical logic specifies:
paradigmatically, `adversarial' argument.
An exploratory experiment which embeds categorial syllogisms in a
discourse of dispute produces data which is encouraging of this
approach. Subjects do produce performance nearer to classical
reasoning, and the control conditions produce data persuasive that
the conventional task is often interpreted nonmonotonically.
If these results are sustained, where should we look for the
psychological and historical origins of our understanding of classical
logic? We suggest in our affective understandings of dispute.
Reference: Stenning, K and van Lambalgen M. (2006) Human Reasoning and
Cognitive Science. MIT Press.