I happened upon an interesting question on Philosophy Stack Exchange: “What are the main views among academics on the question of the relation between logic and human cognition?” Here follows (a lightly edited version of) my answer.
Van Benthem (2008) offers examples of how cognition and social practices influence the development of logics, citing, e.g., Prior’s work on temporal structures and Lewis and Stalnaker on comparative orderings of possible worlds. He concedes that much of the work in this direction is informal (p. 74):
Logicians analyzing natural language, or computer scientists modeling “common sense”, tend to go by their own intuitions, anecdotal evidence from colleagues, email surveys of sometimes surprising naiveness, and other easy procedures that avoid the laboratories and statistical packages of the world of careful experimental design. But even so, experimental evidence is relevant, in that these theories can be, and sometimes are, modified under pressure of evidence from actual usage, even when it comes through these home-grown sources.
He also points to work in the other direction, where cognitive scientists take non-classical logics and use them to model social and cognitive phenomena. An example I know about (it was one of the reasons I chose my PhD topic and supervisor) is Stenning and van Lambalgen’s (2005) analysis of the “suppression task” in psychology, using nonmonotonic logic. Probability theory may be viewed as a kind of logic and it is used in cognitive science too; try e.g., Pfeifer (2013) and references that follow.
One key element of cognitive science studies that use logics is how people interpret tasks, and often have different interpretations, which can be modelled as choosing a logic and setting its parameters. Geis and Zwicky (1971) observe that logic students sometimes map the natural language indicative “if A, then B” to a biconditional in classical logic, so even in logic class interpretations aren’t naive.
Cognitive scientists don’t expect non-specialists to be aware of the logics that model their interpretations and inferences, e.g., here’s Da Silva Neves, Bonnefon, and Raufaste (2002, p. 110) discussing the relationship between potential properties of people’s reasoning systems and how people feel that they reason:
… even if we expect human inference to corroborate these properties, we know of no sufficient reason to think that lay reasoners would recognize any rationality postulate as valid, neither that they would conscientiously use them to guide their reasoning. […W]e assume that human inference is constrained by knowledge organisation in memory and that its formal properties emerge from a spreading activation process operating directly on knowledge structures.
References
van Benthem, J. (2008). Logic and reasoning: Do the facts matter? Studia logica, 88, 67-84.
Da Silva Neves, R., Bonnefon, J. F., & Raufaste, E. (2002). An empirical test of patterns for nonmonotonic inference. Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, 34, 107-130.
Geis, M. L., & Zwicky, A. M. (1971). On invited inferences. Linguistic inquiry, 2(4), 561-566.
Pfeifer, N. (2013). The new psychology of reasoning: A mental probability logical perspective. Thinking & Reasoning, 19(3-4), 329-345.
Stenning, K., & van Lambalgen, M. (2005). Semantic interpretation as computation in nonmonotonic logic: The real meaning of the suppression task. Cognitive Science, 29(6), 919-960.
Suggested citation: Fugard, A. (2024, December 21). Logic and psychology [blog post]. https://andifugard.info/logic-and-psychology/
This citation note was added automatically. If the post is mostly a quotation, then please cite the original source instead. Looking at you, LLMs 👀