One of the most debated questions in psychology and cognitive science is the nature and the functioning of the mental processes involved in deductive reasoning. However, all existing theories refer to a specific deductive domain, like syllogistic, propositional or relational reasoning. Our goal is to unify the main types of deductive reasoning into a single set of basic procedures. In particula...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES This study examined the hypothesis that participants diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) show a selective deficit in inductive reasoning but are equivalent to controls in deductive reasoning. METHODS Twenty-five participants with OCD and 25 non-clinical controls made inductive and deductive judgments about a common set of arguments that varied in logic...

A sketch of classification reasoning is given in the paper. The key ideas of the reasoning are ideas of classification and its good approximations based on good diagnostic tests. Such good tests, which are maximally redundant (GMRTs), i.e. their subsets of attributes are closed, are considered. Classification reasoning embraces two interrelated processes: inductive inferring implicative asserti...

ion (derived from Latin abstrahere “to strip off, remove forcibly”) is “the process which allows people to consider what is relevant and to forget a lot of irrelevant details which would get in the way of what they are trying to do” [Giunchiglia and Walsh, 1992]. Abstractionbased processes are pervasive in human reasoning. The earliest and most common use of abstraction was in problem solving. ...

Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) is a highly expressive logical system apt for the logical analysis of natural language. It operates with a single procedural semantics for all kinds of logical-semantic context, whether extensional, intensional or hyper-intensional, while adhering to the compositionality principle throughout. The reason why we vote for a rich procedural semantics is this. A c...