Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!tdatirv!sarima
From: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: LOGIC AND RELATED STUFF
Message-ID: <69@tdatirv.UUCP>
Date: 27 Jun 91 18:59:34 GMT
References: <9106190527.AA17403@lilac.berkeley.edu> <1991Jun26.152830.12273@cis.ohio-state.edu> <1991Jun26.173142.3060@watdragon.waterloo.edu> <1991Jun27.005850.1176@news.media.mit.edu>
Reply-To: sarima@tdatirv.UUCP (Stanley Friesen)
Organization: Teradata Corp., Irvine
Lines: 26

In article <1991Jun27.005850.1176@news.media.mit.edu> minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky) writes:
>  What Piaget
>discovered, more or less, was that children of even 10 to 12 years old
>are still generally ... not very
>well able to use any of the traditional forms of logical inference.
>Nor, in fact are most adults, except when the problems are handed to
>them in the simplest (unidirectional) forms.

Indeed, it has been my observation that nobody ever uses traditional logic
to 'reason' unless they have been *trained* to do so in school.

This kind of reasoning (modens ponens &c.) is simply alien to normal human
thought patterns and must be 'forced' to be used at all.

That is, human reasoning does not normally take the form of 'if X then Y',
rather it takes the form of 'X is like Y, Y has property a, assume X
has property a'.

Now, the question becomes, can 'reasoning' based on free-association and
analogy-based filtering be adequately captured in any formal system that
can be reasonably called 'a logic'.  [Of course if *any* formal system is
considered to be 'a logic', then we must ask whether asssociative reasoning
is essentially formal (in this sense)].
-- 
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uunet!tdatirv!sarima				(Stanley Friesen)