Formal logic and natural ways of reasoning

In the paper I ask the question about the relation between formal logic and the natural logic of human mind. By a natural logic I mean the ways of thinking of a person that is intelligent but untrained in formal logic. As it turns out that the laws, rules or properties of formal logic in some cases diverge from the natural ways of reasoning, I explain the causes of this divergence. Since the majority of research in this area has been carried out from the standpoint of psychology, as a logician I suggest a slight change of the angle from which we look at the problem. I argue that certain narrowing of an interdisciplinary research would be helpful in getting a better picture of natural logic, and might provide a new stimulus for formal investigations.

On logicality and natural logic

In this paper we focus on the logicality of language, i.e. the idea that the language system contains a deductive device to exclude analytic constructions. Puzzling evidence for the logicality of language comes from acceptable contradictions and tautologies. The standard response in the literature involves assuming that the language system only accesses analyticities that are due to skeletons as opposed to standard logical forms. In this paper we submit evidence in support of alternative accounts of logicality, which reject the stipulation of a natural logic and assume instead the meaning modulation of nonlogical terms.

Candidate Methodology for Analyzing Meaning Making

This paper aims at presenting a candidate methodology for studying psychological processes involved in meaning making. The analysis of meaning making processes poses methodological challenges. Grize’s proposes a neo-Piagetian theory, Natural Logic, which can be used as a methodology approaching the making and the interpretation of meaning, approaching discourse as a complex process interrelating cognitive, social and cultural dimensions. The making of new meaning is nevertheless approached through language use, yet both as a creative process in choosing and assembling words together, and as an interpretative process of reasoning in listening to or reading discursive material. This paper presents some main features of a new methodology for studying meaning making and interpretation processes in psychology, and a quick introduction to its practice based on a short example of analysis. The objective is to contribute to detailed analysis of meaning making, as we find it in complex cognitive activities such as interviewing, presenting or listening to a political discourse, debating, or teaching.

A Natural Logic for Artificial Intelligence, and its Risks and Benefits

This paper is a multidisciplinary project proposal, submitted in the hopes that it may garner enough interest to launch it with members of the AI research community along with linguists and philosophers of mind and language interested in constructing a semantics for a natural logic for AI. The paper outlines some of the major hurdles in the way of “semantics-driven” natural language processing based on standard predicate logic and sketches out the steps to be taken toward a “natural logic”, a semantic system explicitly defined on a well-regimented (but indefinitely expandable) fragment of a natural language that can, therefore, be “intelligently” processed by computers, using the semantic representations of the phrases of the fragment.

Logic and the Movement of Reasoning: Pierre Gassendi on the Three Acts of the Mind

The aim of this paper is to assess the central role the imagination acquires in Pierre Gassendi’s logic. I trace the structuring scheme of the three acts of the mind—common to a good number of late scholastic and early modern logics—to the Thomistic notion of the movement of reasoning in knowledge and argue that Gassendi revisits this notion in his logic. The three acts scheme is from the beginning a bridge between logic and the natural philosophical treatment of the soul. I show how Gassendi’s take on the three acts is similarly poised between his Logic and his Physics and I discuss the rationale, sources and consequences of his attribution of the three acts to the imagination. I argue for the following points: Gassendi’s conception of the logical role of the imagination answers to his empiricist epistemology, his naturalized view of the mind (which involves a defense of thinking in animals) and his notion of a natural logic; it is also operative in his pairing of the formal mechanism of logical operations with a progressive mechanism of the operations of the mind; and it serves as a counterpart to his experimental understanding of the progress of knowledge.1