Does logic only dictate how people ought to reason or can it also describe how human reasoning naturally works? In linguistics, the best theories of how language conveys meaning propose that word meanings have an abstract and formal logical structure. But in psychology, the best theories of people’s reasoning argue that it is naturally flawed, biased, and deeply content-dependent rather than formal. In this course, we will explore this tension and work toward resolving it in order to understand whether and how much human reasoning really is inherently logical. We’ll draw on existing research across the cognitive sciences, and come up with proposals of our own for what the next research steps might be.
A really good syllabus:
CPSY1860 Spring26 S01 Logic in Language and Thought.pdf
General
- An Analogy by Roman
- Language capacity involves nature and nurture
- Reading written text → need explicit training. Similar to formal logic education.
- Speaking a natural language → can be acquired without explicit training, likely because there is certain innate capacity (structure/algorithm, or content/knowledge). Now the question is whether logical reasoning is something like that.
Lec 2 Intro: Formal logic and human reasoning
Pinker (2021). Rationality. Chapters 1 and 3
Sider (2009). Logic for Philosophy. Chapter 1: What is Logic
- Logic is mostly about logical consequence, which is truth-preservation by virtue of form.
- We formalize logic systems such that we can study metalogic.
- Logical constants. Symbols that get special treatments. A logic form must exclusively consist of logical constants (plus punctuation and schematic variables).
- Def. An n-place relation is a set of n-tuples.
Lec 3
Braine (1990). The “natural logic” approach to reasoning
Rips (2001). Two kinds of reasoning
Deductive judgments and inductive judgments
Lec 4 Mental Model Theory
Johnson-Laird (2010). Mental models and human reasoning
Johnson-Laird & Ragni (2025). Reasoning about possibilities
Luca Bonatti (1994). Propositional Reasoning by Model?