The Propagation Rule Compiler (PROP) is a tool developed within the ES-PRIT III project IDEA (Intelligent Database Environment for Advanced Applications). It aims at supporting developers of Chimera applications during schema design and prototyping. PROP consists of two components: the rule compiler as such and an explanation facility. The task of the explanation facility is to graphically illu...

Deductive reasoning is often seen as being composed of an immutable mechanism, universal to all reasoning situations and consisting of either mental models (e.g., Johnson-Laird, 1983) or formal-rules (e.g., Rips, 1994). Many researchers have questioned whether these positions are truly mutually exclusive (e.g., Roberts, 1993, 2000). Most deductive reasoning research has largely ignored the infl...

One of the most important tasks in database technology is to combine the following activities: data mining or inferring knowledge from data and query processing or reasoning on acquired knowledge. The solution of this task requires a logical language with unified syntax and semantics for integrating deductive (using knowledge) and inductive (acquiring knowledge) reasoning. In this paper, we pro...

Deciding how to teach geometry remains a demanding task with one of major arguments being about how to combine the intuitive and deductive aspects of geometry into an effective teaching design. In order to try to obtain an insight into tackling this issue, this paper reports an analysis of innovative geometry textbooks which were published in the early part of the 20th Century, a time when sign...

Much of cognitive research on deductive reasoning has been preoccupied with advocating for or against visuospatial (mental model theory) or linguistic/syntactic (mental logic theory) models of logical reasoning. Neuroimaging studies bear on this issue by pointing to both language-based and visuospatial systems being engaged during logical reasoning, and by raising additional issues not anticipa...