This article takes off from Johan van Benthem’s ruminations on the interface between logic and cognitive science in his position paper “Logic and reasoning: Do the facts matter?”. When trying to answer Van Benthem’s question whether logic can be fruitfully combined with psychological experiments, this article focuses on a specific domain of reasoning, namely higher-order social cognition, including attributions such as “Bob knows that Alice knows that he wrote a novel under pseudonym”. For intelligent interaction, it is important that the (...) participants recursively model the mental states of other agents. Otherwise, an international negotiation may fail, even when it has potential for a win-win solution, and in a time-critical rescue mission, a software agent may depend on a teammate’s action that never materializes. First a survey is presented of past and current research on higher-order social cognition, from the various viewpoints of logic, artificial intelligence, and psychology. Do people actually reason about each other’s knowledge in the way proscribed by epistemic logic? And if not, how can logic and cognitive science productively work together to construct more realistic models of human reasoning about other minds? The paper ends with a delineation of possible avenues for future research, aiming to provide a better understanding of higher-order social reasoning. The methodology is based on a combination of experimental research, logic, computational cognitive models, and agent-based evolutionary models. (shrink)

This paper sets out to evaluate the claim that Aristotle’s Assertoric Syllogistic is a relevance logic or shows significant similarities with it. I prepare the grounds for a meaningful comparison by extracting the notion of relevance employed in the most influential work on modern relevance logic, Anderson and Belnap’s Entailment. This notion is characterized by two conditions imposed on the concept of validity: first, that some meaning content is shared between the premises and the conclusion, and second, that the premises (...) of a proof are actually used to derive the conclusion. Turning to Aristotle’s Prior Analytics, I argue that there is evidence that Aristotle’s Assertoric Syllogistic satisfies both conditions. Moreover, Aristotle at one point explicitly addresses the potential harmfulness of syllogisms with unused premises. Here, I argue that Aristotle’s analysis allows for a rejection of such syllogisms on formal grounds established in the foregoing parts of the Prior Analytics. In a final section I consider the view that Aristotle distinguished between validity on the one hand and syllogistic validity on the other. Following this line of reasoning, Aristotle’s logic might not be a relevance logic, since relevance is part of syllogistic validity and not, as modern relevance logic demands, of general validity. I argue that the reasons to reject this view are more compelling than the reasons to accept it and that we can, cautiously, uphold the result that Aristotle’s logic is a relevance logic. (shrink)

In all three of its manifestations, —abusive, circumstantial and tu quoque—the role of the ad hominem is to raise a doubt about the opposite party’s casemaking bona-fides.Provided that it is both presumptive and provisional, drawing such a conclusion is not a logical mistake, hence not a fallacy on the traditional conception of it. More remarkable is the role of the ad hominem retort in seeking the reassurance of one’s opponent when, on the face of it, reassurance is precisely what he (...) would seem to be ill-placed to give. Brief concluding remarks are given over to an examination of rival approaches to the ad hominem, especially those in which it is conceived of as a dialectical error. (shrink)

Toulmin’s scheme for the layout of arguments (1958, The Uses of Argument, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) represents an influential tool for the analysis of arguments. The scheme enriches the traditional premises-conclusion model of arguments by distinguishing additional elements, like warrant, backing and rebuttal. The present paper contains a formal elaboration of Toulmin’s scheme, and extends it with a treatment of the formal evaluation of Toulmin-style arguments, which Toulmin did not discuss at all. Arguments are evaluated in terms of a so-called (...) dialectical interpretation of their assumptions. In such an interpretation, an argument’s assumptions can be evaluated as defeated, e.g., when there is a defeating reason against the assumption. The present work builds on recent research on defeasible argumentation (cf. e.g. the work of Pollock, Reiter, Loui, Vreeswijk, Prakken, Hage and Dung). More specifically, the author’s work on the dialectical logic DEFLOG and the argumentation tool ARGUMED serve as starting points. (shrink)

Formal nonmonotonic systems try to model the phenomenon that common sense reasoners are able to “jump” in their reasoning from assumptions Δ to conclusions C without their being any deductive chain from Δ to C. Such jumps are done by various mechanisms which are strongly dependent on context and knowledge of how the actual world functions. Our aim is to motivate these jump rules as inference rules designed to optimise survival in an environment with scant resources of effort and time. (...) We begin with a general discussion and quickly move to Section 3 where we introduce five resource principles. We show that these principles lead to some well known nonmonotonic systems such as Nute’s defeasible logic. We also give several examples of practical reasoning situations to illustrate our principles. (shrink)

In this paper two concepts of psychologism in logic are outlined: the one which Frege and Husserl fought against and the new psychologism, or cognitivism, which underlies a cognitive turn in contemporary logic. Four issues such cognitively oriented logic should be interested in are indicated. They concern: new fields opened for logical analysis, new methods and tools needed to address these fields, neural basis of logical reasoning, and an educational problem: how to teach such logic? Several challenging questions, which arise (...) in the context of these issues, are listed. (shrink)

Since its modern inception in the early 1970s, informal logic has placed a special emphasis on the analysis of fallacies and argumentative dialogue schemes. Concurrent developments in speech communication circles exhibit a like concentration on the dialectical character of argument.

An Introduction to the Special Issue on Question Processing.

Charles Sanders Peirce was one of the United States’ most original and profound thinkers, and a prolific writer. Peirce’s game theory-based approaches to the semantics and pragmatics of signs and language, to the theory of communication, and to the evolutionary emergence of signs, provide a toolkit for contemporary scholars and philosophers. Drawing on unpublished manuscripts, the book offers a rich, fresh picture of the achievements of a remarkable man.

This article aims to analyze the scope and limits of common cause abduction which is a version of explanatory abduction based on Hans Reichenbach’s Principle of the Common Cause. First, it is argued that common cause abduction can be regarded as a rational inferential mechanism that enables us to accept hypotheses that aim to account for the surprising correlations of events. Three arguments are presented in support of common cause abduction: the argument from screening-off, the argument from likelihood, and the (...) argument from simplicity. Second, it is claimed, that common cause abduction is a defeasible reasoning, i.e., common cause abductive hypotheses are not always more plausible than separate cause abductive hypotheses. Finally, it is outlined what factors should be taken into account in order to use common cause abduction in a reasonable way. (shrink)

This paper addresses the question whether the past couple of decades of formal research in belief revision offers evidence of a new psychologism in logic. In the first part I examine five potential arguments in favour of this thesis and find them all wanting. In the second part of the paper I argue that belief revision research has climbed up a hierarchy of models for the change of doxastic states that appear to be clearly normative at the bottom, but are (...) more amenable to an empirical-descriptive interpretation on higher levels. I conclude that this observation might offer a foothold for the thesis that there is a new psychologism in logic. (shrink)

This volume presents mathematical game theory as an interface between logic and philosophy.

The traditional concepts of rhetorical strategy and argumentative fallacy cannot be readily reconciled. Doing so requires escaping the following argument: All argumentation involves rhetorical strategies. All rhetorical strategies are violations of logical or dialectical ideals. All violations of logical or dialectical ideals are fallacies. Normative pragmatics provides a perspective in which rhetorical strategies can be seen to have the potential for constructive contributions to argumentation and in which fallacies are not simply violations of ideals. One kind of constructive contribution, framing (...) moves, is illustrated with the case of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 TV campaign commercial known as the Daisy ad. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss Floridi’s views concerning semantic information in the light of a recent contribution (in collaboration with the present author) [1] that defies the traditional view of deductive reasoning as “analytic” or “tautological” and construes it as an informative, albeit non-empirical, activity. We argue that this conception paves the way for a more realistic notion of semantic information where the “ideal agents” that are assumed by the standard view can be indefinitely approximated by real ones equipped with (...) growing computational resources. (shrink)