Abstract
Three studies of human nonmonotonic reasoning are described. The results show that people find such reasoning quite difficult, although being given problems with known subclass-superclass relationships is helpful. The results also show that recognizing differences in the logical strengths of arguments is important for the nonmonotonic problems studied. For some of these problems, specificity – which is traditionally considered paramount in drawing appropriate conclusions – was irrelevant and so should have lead to a “can’t tell” response; however, people could give rational conclusions based on differences in the logical consequences of arguments. The same strategy also works for problems where specificity is relevant, suggesting that in fact specificity is not paramount. Finally, results showed that subjects’ success at responding appropriately to nonmonotonic problems involving conflict relies heavily on the ability to appreciate differences in the logical strength of simple, non-conflicting, statements.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bacchus F. (1989). ‘A Modest, but Semantically Well Founded, Inheritance Reasoner’. Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on AI, pp. 1104–1109
R. Elio F.J. Pelletier (1994) ‘On Relevance in Non-Monotonic Reasoning: Some Empirical Studies’ R. Greiner D. Subramanian (Eds) Relevance: American Association for Artificial Intelligence 1994 Fall Symposium Series AAAI Menlo Park, CA 64–67
J.St.B.T. Evans S.E. Newstead R.M.J. Byrne (1993) Human Reasoning: The Psychology of Deduction Erlbaum Hillsdale
M. Ford (1995) ArticleTitle‘Two Modes of Mental Representation and Problem Solution in Syllogistic Reasoning’ Cognition 54 1–71 Occurrence Handle10.1016/0010-0277(94)00625-U
M. Ford D. Billington (2000) ArticleTitle‘Strategies in Human Nonmonotonic Reasoning’ Computational Intelligence 16 446–468 Occurrence Handle10.1111/0824-7935.00119
Hewson C., Vogel C. (1994). ’Psychological Evidence for Assumptions of Path- Based Inheritance Reasoning’. Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 409–414
J.F. Horty (1994) ‘Some Direct Theories of Nonmonotonic Reasoning’ D.M. Gabbay C.J. Hogger J.A. Robinson (Eds) Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming, Vol. 3: Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Uncertain Reasoning Clarendon Press Oxford 111–187
P.N. Johnson-Laird R. Byrne (1991) Deduction Erlbaum Hove
S. Kraus D. Lehmann M. Magidor (1990) ArticleTitle‘Nonmonotonic Reasoning, Preferential Models and Cumulative Models’ Artificial Intelligence 44 167–207 Occurrence Handle10.1016/0004-3702(90)90101-5
D. Nute (1994) ‘Defeasible Logic’ D.M. Gabbay C.J. Hogger J.A. Robinson (Eds) Handbook of Logic in Artificial Intelligence and Logic Programming; Vol. 3. Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Uncertain Reasoning Clarendon Press Oxford 353–395
K. Schlechta (1997) ’Nonmonotonic Logics: Basic Concepts, Results, and Techniques’ Springer-Verlag Berlin
L. Sonenberg R. Topor (1994) ArticleTitle‘A Preferred Model Semantics for Inheritance Networks’ Methods of Logic in Computer Science 1 3–18
Stein L.A. (1989). ‘Skeptical Inheritance: Computing the Intersection of Credulous Extensions’. Proceedings of the 11th International Joint Conference on AI, pp. 1153–1158
Touretzky D.S. (1984) ‘Implicit Ordering of Defaults in Inheritance Systems’. Proceedings of the AAAI-84, pp. 322–325
C. Vogel (1996) ‘Human Reasoning with Negative Defaults’ D. Gabbay H.J. Ohlbach (Eds) Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence: Practical Reasoning Springer Berlin 606–621
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ford, M. Human Nonmonotonic Reasoning: the Importance of Seeing the Logical Strength of Arguments. Synthese 146, 71–92 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-005-9071-z
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-005-9071-z