A probability heuristic model (PHM) for syllogistic reasoning is proposed. An informational ordering over quantified statements suggests simple probability based heuristics for syllogistic reasoning. The most important is the "min-heuristic": choose the type of the least informative premise as the type of the conclusion. The rationality of this heuristic is confirmed by an analysis of the proba...

Existing standards for crisp description logics facilitate information exchange between systems that reason with crisp ontologies. Applications with probabilistic or possibilistic extensions of ontologies and reasoners promise to capture more information, because they can deal with more uncertainties or vagueness of information. However, since there are no standards for either extension, inform...

How emotions influence syllogistic reasoning is not well understood. fMRI was employed to investigate the effects of induced positive or negative emotion on syllogistic reasoning. Specifically, on a trial-by-trial basis participants were exposed to a positive, negative, or neutral picture, immediately prior to engagement in a reasoning task. After viewing and rating the valence and intensity of...

This paper translates Aristotle’s syllogistic logic of the Analytica priora into the sphere of computational-combinatorical research methods. The task is accomplished by formalising Aristotle’s logical system in terms of rule-based reduction relations on a suitable basic set, which allow us to apply standard concepts of the theory of such structures (Newman lemma) to the ancient logical system....

Does cognition sometimes literally extend into the extraorganismic environment (Clark, 2003), or is it always “merely” environmentally embedded (Rupert, 2004)? Underlying this current border dispute is the question about how to individuate cognitive processes on principled grounds. Based on recent evidence about the active role of representation selection and construction in learning how to rea...

Abstract. Psychological experiments on syllogistic reasoning have shown that participants did not always deduce the classical logically valid conclusions. In particular, the results show that they had di culties to reason with syllogistic statements that contradicted their own beliefs. This paper discusses syllogisms in human reasoning and proposes a formalization under the weak completion sema...

In a recent meta-analysis, Khemlani & Johnson-Laird (2012) showed that the conclusions drawn by human reasoners in psychological experiments about syllogistic reasoning are not the conclusions predicted by classical first-order logic. Moreover, current cognitive theories deviate significantly from the empirical data. In this paper we show how human syllogistic reasoning can be modelled under th...