Human conditional-reasoning "fallacies" have a logic-programming account, rival to the probabilistic one

The classic "irrational" results in the psychology of conditional reasoning — people happily affirm the consequent (infer P from "if P then C" plus C) and deny the antecedent — turn out to be formalizable as default / closed-world reasoning, the same non-monotonic machinery Reiter built for incomplete databases. This puts a logic-programming account of human reasoning next to the probabilistic account the vault already holds (claim-oaksford-chater-wason-optimal-data-selection / Oaksford & Chater's Bayesian reading of the Wason task).

Claim 1 — the "fallacies" are pragmatic, not broken. "In psychology and cognitive science, it is well known that humans are more likely to perform logically invalid but pragmatic inference." Affirming the consequent (AC) and denying the antecedent (DA) are "logically invalid and often called logical fallacies. Nevertheless, humans often perform AC or DA as pragmatic inference in daily life." (Sakama 2024, source_url above, Tier 1) — driven by conditional perfection: hearing "if" as "if and only if."

Claim 2 — the engine is Reiter's default logic. Sakama realizes AC/DA/DC inference in Answer Set Programming, where "Inference in ASP is deduction based on default logic (Reiter (1980))." (Sakama 2024, Tier 1) The same author (Reiter) built the closed-world assumption for databases in 1978 — "what is not currently known to be true must be false" (Wikipedia, CWA, Tier 4, definitional pointer).

Claim 3 — two rival formalisms, same data. Sakama frames a probabilistic lineage — "(Oaksford and Chater (2001))" — against a computational-logic lineage where "relatively little attention has been paid for realizing such pragmatic inference in computational logic or logic programming (Stenning and Lambalgen (2008); Kowalski (2011))." (Sakama 2024, Tier 1)

Why this was hop-worthy

A cross-domain + cross-time bridge (1978 database logic → 2024 model of human cognition) that supplies the vault a second, non-Bayesian formal account of the same Wason/conditional-reasoning data it already documents.

Further leads

• Stenning & van Lambalgen, Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2008) — "reasoning to an interpretation" then "from" it.
• Robert Kowalski, Computational Logic and Human Thinking (2011) — co-inventor of logic programming; default reasoning as a special case of assumption-based argumentation.
• "Conditional perfection" (Geis & Zwicky 1971) — the linguistics of hearing "if" as "iff."

Hop chain

Seed: 30-notes/claim-obligatory-attributes-as-gap-signal.md (vault note; hopped away from its gap-detection topic via its aside on "the open-world assumption problem").

Hop 1 — Closed-world assumption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption)

• Hook type: Cross-domain bridge (cross-time: 1978 logic ↔ present)
• Hook: the seed's phrase "sidesteps the open-world assumption problem"; OWA/CWA is Reiter (1978), sitting beside default logic, non-monotonic logic, circumscription.
• Why followed: highest-priority hook type; vault_bridge flagged an unlinked pair ("MOC: Inference" ↔ Oaksford & Chater / Wason) around this concept.
• Key findings: CWA = "what is not currently known to be true must be false"; negation-as-failure "amounts to believing false every predicate that cannot be proved." Related to default/non-monotonic logic.

Hop 2 — Stenning & van Lambalgen, closed-world reasoning & the Wason task (WebSearch, semanticscholar.org paper page)

• Hook type: Surprising claim
• Hook: that the "irrational" Wason results are actually closed-world reasoning with negation-as-failure — human reasoning modeled by the database machinery.
• Why followed: it would connect the vault's logic/inference cluster to its reasoning-psychology cluster.
• Key findings: humans reason "to" an interpretation, then "from" it; "many seemingly irrational choices [are] better understood as applications of alternative logics."

Hop 3 — Sakama, "Human Conditional Reasoning in Answer Set Programming," TPLP 2024 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04412, Tier 1, extract_pdf tls:verified)

• Hook type: Mechanism question
• Hook: how, concretely, are AC/DA "fallacies" realized in logic programming?
• Why followed: primary source grounding the bridge with formal machinery and citing both rival lineages.
• Key findings: AC/DA/DC realized via program "completion" in ASP, built on Reiter's default logic; explicitly juxtaposes Oaksford–Chater (probabilistic) with Stenning–Lambalgen / Kowalski (logic-programming).

Hop 4 — Robert Kowalski (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kowalski)

• Hook type: The person behind the thing (zoom-out, lands on AI)
• Hook: cited co-founder of logic programming who argued human thinking is computational logic.
• Why followed: closes the loop to AI's home planet; connects to the vault's mind/computation notes (Dreyfus, Newell & Simon).
• Key findings: Kowalski develops "both human-oriented models of computing and computational models of human thinking"; showed "most logics for default reasoning can be regarded as special cases of assumption-based argumentation" — back to Reiter's default logic.

Surprise: expected the Wason task's "fallacies" to have one dominant formal account (the vault's probabilistic Oaksford–Chater reading) — found a second, independent logic-programming/closed-world account that explains the same data via Reiter's default logic. Surprise: expected the closed-world assumption to stay confined to databases and the Semantic Web — found it repurposed as a psychological model of how people actually reason with "if."

Saved hooks not followed:

• Conditional perfection / invited inference (Geis & Zwicky 1971) — from Sakama 2024 — a cross-domain bridge to linguistic pragmatics; why the "fallacies" happen at all.
• Assumption-based argumentation (Dung, Kowalski, Toni) — from Kowalski page — unifying frame in which default logics are special cases; possible bridge to the vault's argumentation/inference cluster.
• Partial-Closed-World Assumption (PCWA) — from Wikipedia CWA — the "mark specific parts complete" middle ground; ties directly back to the seed's obligatory-attributes gap detection.

post-worthy: maybe — a clean cross-time bridge (database logic → human cognition) that gives the vault a rival to an account it already holds, but it needs the S&vL primary read before it's publication-solid.