Adult reasoning has been shown as mediated by the inhibition of intuitive beliefs that are in conflict with logic. The current study introduces a classic procedure from the memory field to investigate belief inhibition in 12- to 17-year-old reasoners. A lexical decision task was used to probe the memory accessibility of beliefs that were cued during thinking on syllogistic reasoning problems. R...

This paper is a continuation of earlier studies involving practical experiments with students using various versions of the e-learning system, Syllog. It has been investigated to what extent such tools can be helpful for the students in e-learning and in the context of logic teaching in order to obtain a better understanding of syllogistic reasoning. The aim of the present paper is to discuss h...

We propose new axiomatizations of the 24 assertoric syllogisms of Aristotle’s syllogistic, and the 2 n n-ary operations of Boole’s algebraic logic. The former organizes the syllogisms as a 6 × 4 table partitioned into four connected components according to which term if any must be inhabited. We give two natural-deduction style axiomatizations, one with four axioms and four rules, the second wi...

philosophy of mathematics suited well the ‘‘general emphasisin later nineteenth-century mathematics on revisiting foundationalquestions’’ (p. 61). Pure geometry as it emerged from Frege, Paschand Hilbert, provided a diagram-free, purely sentential notion ofproof, which has lasted unto our own day.In the second, and greater, part of the book, Greaves traces outthe interre...

This paper argues that the traditional description of Aristotelian logic as a “tool” (organon) philosophy corresponds to instrumental role Aristotle’s logical investigations in context dialectical debates and scientific inquiry. Aristotle investigates propositions their mutual relations within arguments provide tool for discovery premisses which could serve refute or establish conclusion regard...

Another main plank in their argument is that MMT provides a better account of syllogistic reasoning than the probability heuristics model (PHM) [5]. However, the meta-analysis [6] they report comparing PHM with MMT used accuracy as a measure but did not allow PHM to predict no valid conclusion responses. This move contradicts PHM in which no valid conclusion responses are predicted by one of it...

Syllogistic reasoning is modeled in analog hardware and some hardware models, i.e. syllogisms Baroco and Darii are presented. Chaining of syllogisms is modeled by using original min-max entities (circuits), “to see” whether the two rules, modeled in dedicated hardware, i.e., IF A THEN B and IF B THEN C imply the “hardware” rule IF A THEN C. The preliminaries include original min-max circuits ba...

One of the most debated questions in psychology and cognitive science is the nature and the functioning of the mental processes involved in deductive reasoning. However, all existing theories refer to a specific deductive domain, like syllogistic, propositional or relational reasoning. Our goal is to unify the main types of deductive reasoning into a single set of basic procedures. In particula...

Generics are statements that are not explicitly quantified and that express generalizations, such as ‘ducks lay eggs’. Intuitively, the generic (non-quantified) form of such statements seems to be true. Furthermore, people seem to be prone to an interesting error: treating the universal form of characteristic generic assertions (e.g., ‘all ducks lay eggs’) as true, even though they are, upon a ...

This paper argues that the goals people have when reasoning determine their own norms of reasoning. A radical descriptivism which avoids norms never worked for any science; nor can it work for the psychology of reasoning. Norms as we understand them are illustrated with examples from categorical syllogistic reasoning and the "new paradigm" of subjective probabilities. We argue that many formal ...