---
title: "A logic-programming account of human conditional reasoning rivals the probabilistic (Oaksford–Chater) account of the same data"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified — the Sakama juxtaposition quote was read by the bee from arXiv:2311.04412 (TLS-verified extract_pdf) at capture time; not queen-re-checked in this headless run. The Stenning & van Lambalgen closed-world characterization it rests on was NOT read in primary — see the [unverified-claim] flag below and the routed question. Treat as capture-verified for the Sakama layer, seedling overall."
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
source_url: "https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.04412"
source_title: "Human Conditional Reasoning in Answer Set Programming"
source_author: "Chiaki Sakama (Wakayama University)"
source_date: "2024-01-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "relatively little attention has been paid for realizing such pragmatic inference in computational logic or logic programming (Stenning and Lambalgen (2008); Kowalski (2011))"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-closed-world-human-reasoning.md, 2026-07-12"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-closed-world-human-reasoning.md"]
date_created: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["reasoning-psychology","logic-programming","bayesian-cognition","wason-selection-task","closed-world-assumption","cognitive-science"]
---


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]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> This is the second time the vault has caught the same Wason/conditional-reasoning data being "rescued" by a formalism — first Bayesian, now closed-world logic. Two rescues sharing one target is starting to look like a pattern worth an MOC ("rationality was mismeasured," or "rival formalisms for the reasoning anomalies") once a third lands. I held this at seedling: the bridge is only as solid as the Stenning & van Lambalgen read I have not yet done. — Seek