AILo Talk - Klee Schöppl, University of Groningen

Title: Checking predictions by connexive logics against experimental data on reasoning

Abstract:

Classical logic (CL), with its material conditional interpretation of ->, diverges from how humans actually reason: So-called connexive principles, like Aristotle’s ¬(A → ¬ A) and Boethius’ theses (A → B) → ¬ (A → ¬ B), are contingent according to CL, but intuitively appear tautological. These armchair intuitions spurred the creation of connexive logics crafted to validate such principles.

This talk presents data from experiments (n=72) investigating how participants judge a variety of selected propositional formulae, among them core connexive principles. Apart from strengthening the connexive case generally, these results can also serve to discriminate between different proposed connexive logics, as we show for two example semantics from coherence-based probability logic.

This talk is based on joint work with Niki Pfeifer