Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (Bradford Books)

Features

• Cover Type: Hard Cover with 392 pages
• Published by: The MIT Press
• Edition: 1st Edition August 31, 2008
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0262195836
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0262195836
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 1.1 inches
• Weighs: 1.8 pounds

Product Review
"Once in a while there is a body of work that reconceptualizes a topic of research. This book reports and reviews such a body of work. The result is a framing and hypotheses about reasoning that, in my judgment, fundamentally reconstructs the psychology of inferential reasoning . This book will be regarded as the major turning point in the field's development."
—James Greeno, Learning Research, and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh

"This deep and stimulating book, by a leading psychologist and a leading logician, is about the choice of logical formalisms for representing actual reasoning. There are two interlocking questions: what are the right formalisms to represent how people reason, and what forms do the reasoners themselves bring to the world in order to reason about it? The authors' answer to the first question, using closed-world reasoning, allows them to analyse the wide range of strategies that people use for shaping their thinking. For example, the book uncovers important links between autism and nonmonotonic reasoning. This may be the first book in cognitive science that logicians can learn some new logic from."
—Wilfrid Hodges, Queen Mary, University of London

Product Description
In Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science, Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen—a cognitive scientist and a logician—argue for the indispensability of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. Logic and cognition were once closely connected, they write, but were "divorced" in the past century; the psychology of deduction went from being central to the cognitive revolution to being the subject of widespread skepticism about whether human reasoning really happens outside the academy. Stenning and van Lambalgen argue that logic and reasoning have been separated because of a series of unwarranted assumptions about logic.

Stenning and van Lambalgen contend that psychology cannot ignore processes of interpretation in which people, wittingly or unwittingly, frame problems for subsequent reasoning. The authors employ a neurally implementable defeasible logic for modeling part of this framing process, and show how it can be used to guide the design of experiments and interpret results. They draw examples from deductive reasoning, from the child's development of understandings of mind, from analysis of a psychiatric disorder (autism), and from the search for the evolutionary origins of human higher mental processes.

The picture proposed is one of fast, cheap, automatic but logical processes bringing to bear general knowledge on the interpretation of task, language, and context, thus enabling human reasoners to go beyond the information given. This proposal puts reasoning back at center stage.

A Bradford Book

Reader Reviews
First, I agree with the professional reviews listed above. What matters most to me about this book is that it presents experimental evidence of more precisely what humans do when we reason. In particular, subjects are analyzed as they engage problems in logic. The results presented explain how it is logic can be controversial. There is more to logic than is conventionally assumed. There are steps in logic which pivot on what the individual interprets the logical problem to be about. One's interpretation then determines the direction of logical thought. Experimental evidence available in such a critical human endeavor as logical reasoning is extremely important. It keeps one from getting side-tracked. This book complements nicely the understanding I have acquired in my recent reading. In Heil's book _From an Ontological Point of View_, I learned to take ontology seriously. Then in Jacquette's _Ontology_, I learned the crucial role of logic in escaping the anthropocentric imprisonment of experience. That led me to Hanna's _Rationality and Logic_, in which I learned about the biological basis in which logical analysis occurs. I found that Bermudez's _Thinking Without Words_ confirmed the biology of logic. And now, this book helps me to understand the role of interpretation in reasoning. And the crucial role of interpretation has led me back to Munz's _Critique of Impure Reason_, in which interpretation is presented as an obstacle that cognitive science has got to take seriously. These six books taken together have been immensely helpful in my own persistent attempt to understand what's really going on here. It is deeply gratifying to reflect on the breadth of analysis these authors have made available.