Language-Reason

Relational Language Helps Children Reason Analogically

This paper explores the role of relational language in the development of children’s analogical reasoning ability. In two experiments, children were asked to make a relational mapping between two pictures while ignoring a competing object match. Three-and-a-half-year-olds, 51⁄2-year-olds, and 7-year-olds were all more successful at this task when they heard relational language. Experiment 2 fur...

DAML+OIL: A Reason-able Web Ontology Language

Ontologies are set to play a key role in the ”Semantic Web”, extending syntactic interoperability to semantic interoperability by providing a source of shared and precisely defined terms. DAML+OIL is an ontology language specifically designed for use on the web; it exploits existing web standards (XML and RDF), adding the familiar ontological primitives of object oriented and frame based system...

Learning to Reason: a Reason!-able Approach

How are general informal reasoning skills acquired? Little research has been done on this topic. Two hypotheses dominate. According to the strong situated learning hypothesis, there are no general informal reasoning skills (only contextor domainspecific skills) and so nothing can be done to improve them. According to the practice hypothesis, general informal reasoning can be improved through in...

Distorting Reason

When No Reason For Is A Reason Against

We provide a Bayesian justification of the idea that, under certain conditions, the absence of an argument in favour of the truth of a hypothesis H constitutes a good argument against the truth of H.