Linguistic barriers to logical reasoning: a new perspective on Aristotelian syllogisms
Andreas Haida, Luka Crnic, Yosef Grodzinsky
May 2018 

Experimental studies investigating logical reasoning performance show very high error rates of up to 80% and more. Previous research identified scalar inferences of the sentences of logical arguments as a major error source. We present new analytical tools to quantify the impact of scalar inferences on syllogistic reasoning. Our proposal builds on a new classification of Aristotelian syllogisms and a closely linked classification of reasoning behaviors/strategies. We argue that the variation in error rates across syllogistic reasoning tasks is in part due to individual variation: reasoners follow different reasoning strategies and these strategies play out differently for syllogisms of different classes.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/004007 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of "Sinn und Bedeutung 22"
keywords:	syllogisms, reasoning errors, individual variation, scalar inferences, semantics
Downloaded:	507 times

 

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