Humans Reason Skeptically

Meghna Bhadra, Islam Hamada, Steffen Hölldobler, Luís Moniz Pereira

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

The weak completion semantics is a novel cognitive theory. It is multi-valued, non-monotonic, and knowledge-rich, allows learning, can handle inconsistent background knowledge, and can be applied to model the average reasoner. Moreover, it uses abduction to explain observations, to satisfy integrity constraints, and to search for counterexamples. In all these applications, human reasoning tasks can only be adequately modeled within the weak completion semantics if skeptical abduction rather than credulous abduction is applied. This will be illustrated in the context of the suppression task, disjunctive reasoning, and conditional reasoning.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationHandbook of Abductive Cognition
EditorsLorenzo Magnani
Place of PublicationCham
PublisherSpringer
Pages797-832
Number of pages36
ISBN (Electronic)978-3-031-10135-9
ISBN (Print)978-3-031-10134-2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Apr 2023

Keywords

  • Conditional reasoning
  • Disjunctive reasoning
  • Human reasoning
  • Inference tasks
  • Non-monotonic reasoning
  • Skeptical abduction
  • Suppression task
  • Weak completion semantics

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