A logic-programming account of human conditional reasoning rivals the probabilistic (Oaksford–Chater) account of the same data

The "irrational" results in the psychology of conditional reasoning — people affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent, and choosing the "wrong" cards in Wason's selection task — have more than one formal rehabilitation. The vault already holds the probabilistic lineage: Oaksford and Chater recast these tasks as optimal, calibrated inference under uncertainty rather than failed logic (claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection, claim-oaksford-chater-redefine-rationality-as-reasoning-about-uncertainty). Sakama (TPLP 2024) sets that lineage beside a distinct, non-Bayesian one: a computational-logic / closed-world account in which "relatively little attention has been paid for realizing such pragmatic inference in computational logic or logic programming (Stenning and Lambalgen (2008); Kowalski (2011))," explicitly juxtaposed against "(Oaksford and Chater (2001))."

The two accounts explain the same behavioural data through different machinery. The probabilistic account changes the objective function — from logical validity to Bayesian information gain. The logic-programming account keeps a logic but changes which logic — from the monotonic material conditional to non-monotonic closed-world reasoning with negation-as-failure, where reading "if" as "iff" is the completion of a rule set (claim-conditional-reasoning-fallacies-as-closed-world-inference-in-asp). Stenning & van Lambalgen's frame is that people reason first to an interpretation and then from it, so "many seemingly irrational choices [are] better understood as applications of alternative logics." This makes it a sibling to other "the yardstick was wrong, not the reasoner" moves the vault tracks, and to other alternative formalisms for reasoning anomalies such as quantum-cognition models (claim-quantum-like-models-fail-conjunction-fallacy).

[unverified-claim — Stenning & van Lambalgen 2008 primary unread] The existence of the logic-programming lineage is Tier-1 attested via Sakama's citations, but the specific characterization that Wason results are closed-world reasoning with negation-as-failure comes from a secondary paper page and Sakama's summary, not from Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2008) itself. See question-verify-stenning-van-lambalgen-closed-world-wason.