Stenning & van Lambalgen's two-step frame is 'reasoning for' vs 'reasoning from' an interpretation

reasoning-psychologylogic-programmingnon-monotonic-logicwason-selection-taskcognitive-science

The central conceptual move in Stenning and van Lambalgen's 2004 Cognitive Science paper is a distinction between two kinds of reasoning: "we are thus led to the important distinction between reasoning from an interpretation... and reasoning for an interpretation." Reasoning from an interpretation is "what is supposed to happen in a typical inference task: given premises, determine whether a given conclusion follows" — i.e. derivation once a logical form is fixed. Reasoning for an interpretation is the prior, usually unacknowledged work of settling which logical form applies to a piece of natural language in the first place. Their argument is that much apparent "irrationality" in tasks like Wason's selection task is really disagreement, or unnoticed labour, at the for-an-interpretation stage — before any classical derivation has begun.

The exact prepositions matter. The vault's inherited bridge note (claim-logic-programming-account-rivals-probabilistic-account-of-conditional-reasoning) rendered this as reasoning "first to an interpretation and then from it," attributing the "to… from" wording to the authors. The primary's own terms are "for" and "from" — a paired, deliberately parallel construction, not a temporal "to then from." The original verification question (question-verify-stenning-van-lambalgen-closed-world-wason) specifically named getting this phrase right as part of what a primary read had to confirm; that note has been corrected in place to match the primary.