Is Human Reasoning Really Nonmonotonic?

• Authors: Piotr Łukowski
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

It seems that nonmonotonicity of our reasoning is an obvious truth. Almost every logician not even believes, but simply knows very well that a human being thinks in a nonmonotonic way. Moreover, a nonmono- tonicity of thinking seems to be a phenomenon parallel to the existence of human beings. Examples allegedly illustrating this phenomenon are not even analyzed today. They are simply quoted. Nowadays, this is a standard approach to nonmonotonicity. However, even simple analysis of those “obvious” examples shows that they illustrate various problems of our thinking, among which none concerns nonmonotonicity.

Keywords

EN

entimematic premise; error of generality; human thinking; non- monotonic reasoning; nonmonotonicity; non-nonmonotonicity; Tweety the ostrich; reasoning increasing preciseness; reasoning from open and hidden premises; stereotypical thinking; thinking by the most frequent cases

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń)
• Journal: Logic and Logical Philosophy
• Year: 2013
• Volume: 22
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 63-73

Dates

published

2013-03-01

online

2013-07-02

Contributors

author

Piotr Łukowski

• Department of Cognitive Science Institute of Psychology University of Łodź, Poland

References

• Gabbay, D.M., C. J. Hogger and J.A. Robinson (eds.), Handbook ofLogic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, Volume 3, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1994.
• Ginsberg, M. L., “AI and nonmonotonic reasoning”, pages 1-33 in Gabbay (1994).
• Poole, D., “Default logic”, pages 189-215 in Gabbay (1994).
• Makinson, D., “General patterns in nonmonotonic reasoning”, pages 35-110 in Gabbay (1994).

Identifiers

DOI

10.12775/LLP.2013.004