Reason to Promotion Inferences

On the Synthesis of Disjunctive Inferences of Reason

The transcendental Logic of disjunctive synthesis presents one of the more subtle fine points in Kant's Critical system. Kant's own lectures on the subject appearing in Logik can be difficult to follow owing to Kant's annoying habit of not identifying, much less defining, many of his key technical terms. Compounding the problem for the English-speaking world is the fact that English translation...

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...

Generalizing Monotonicity Inferences to Opposition Inferences

This paper generalizes the notion of monotonicities to opposition properties (OPs). Some propositions regarding the OPs of determiners will be proposed and proved. We will also define the notion of OP-chain and deduce a condition that enables us to determine the OPs of an iterated quantifier in its predicates based on the OPs of its constituent determiners.

Vision to reason

How to Reason Defeasibly

This paper describes the construction of a general-purpose defeasible reasoner that is complete for first-order logic and provably adequate for the argument-based conception of defeasible reasoning that I have developed elsewhere. Because the set of warranted conclusions for a defeasible reasoner will not generally be recursively enumerable, a defeasible reasoner based upon a rich logic like th...