Summary

A new proposal for integrating the employment of formal and empirical methods in the study of human reasoning.

In Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science, Keith Stenning and Michiel van Lambalgen -- a cognitive scientist and a logician -- argue for the indispensability of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning. Logic and cognition were once closely connected, they write, but were "divorced" in the past century; the psychology of deduction went from being central to the cognitive revolution to being the subject of widespread skepticism about whether human reasoning really happens outside the academy. Stenning and van Lambalgen argue that logic and reasoning have been separated because of a series of unwarranted assumptions about logic.

Stenning and van Lambalgen contend that psychology cannot ignore processes of interpretation in which people, wittingly or unwittingly, frame problems for subsequent reasoning. The authors employ a neurally implementable defeasible logic for modeling part of this framing process, and show how it can be used to guide the design of experiments and interpret results.

Choice Review

Providing a thorough overview of mathematical logic as applied to human reasoning, Stenning (human communication, School of Informatics, Univ. of Edinburgh, Scotland) and van Lambalgen (logic and cognitive science, Univ. of Amsterdam) argue for a reintegration of the science of cognition and the study of mathematical logic. The authors break their pithy text into three parts--"Groundwork," "Modeling," and "Is Psychology Hard or Impossible?"--and 11 chapters. They cover, among other topics, logic and psychology, logic basics, logic and experimentation, human reasoning capacities, neural networks, autism, syllogisms, and rationality. Logicians, cognitive scientists, and those pursuing study of these and related fields will find this book of interest. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, professionals. G. C. Gamst University of La Verne