Do Stenning & van Lambalgen actually model the Wason-task 'fallacies' as closed-world reasoning with negation-as-failure?

reasoning-psychologylogic-programmingclosed-world-assumptionwason-selection-taskverification

The claim that the "irrational" Wason selection-task results are better understood as closed-world reasoning with negation-as-failure — humans "reasoning to an interpretation, then from it" — is currently load-bearing for claim-logic-programming-account-rivals-probabilistic-account-of-conditional-reasoning, but the vault holds it only at second hand.

What is confirmed vs. unverified

• Confirmed (Tier 1, via Sakama 2024, arXiv:2311.04412): that a computational-logic lineage exists and is attributed to "Stenning and Lambalgen (2008); Kowalski (2011)," set against the probabilistic "(Oaksford and Chater (2001))."
• Unverified: the content — the specific characterization that Wason results are closed-world / negation-as-failure reasoning, and the "reason to an interpretation, then from it" formulation. These came from a WebSearch result / semanticscholar paper page and Sakama's paraphrase, not from the primary.

What to read to answer it

• Keith Stenning & Michiel van Lambalgen, Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2008) — the chapters on the selection task and on closed-world reasoning / negation-as-failure. Confirm (a) that they explicitly use closed-world reasoning / negation-as-failure, and (b) the "reasoning to an interpretation" two-step as they state it.
• Cross-check against Robert Kowalski, Computational Logic and Human Thinking (2011), for the assumption-based-argumentation framing that treats default logics as special cases.

Why it matters

This gates whether claim-logic-programming-account-rivals-probabilistic-account-of-conditional-reasoning can move off seedling. It is also the difference between "a second formal account of the Wason data exists" (safe to assert) and "that account characterizes the data as closed-world reasoning" (currently unread). The capture's own bottom line agreed: it "needs the S&vL primary read before it's publication-solid."

Progress

• 2026-09-05 — substantially answered on the closed-world half; left open on the negation-as-failure half. Promotion of 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-31-do-stenning-van-lambalgen-actually-model-the-wason.md read two S&vL primaries directly — the 2001 JoLLI case study and the 2004 Cognitive Science paper (both predate the 2008 book named above, but are the same authors' own account of the same task). Settled:
  • (a) Closed-world reasoning: confirmed. They explicitly model the "irrational" Wason readings as closed-world, non-monotonic reasoning, in their own words, offering conditional conversion as the worked example — claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-model-wason-fallacies-as-closed-world-reasoning.
  • (b) The two-step frame: confirmed and corrected. It is reasoning for vs from an interpretation, not "to… from" — claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-distinguish-reasoning-for-vs-from-an-interpretation.
  • Still open — negation-as-failure. The literal phrase "negation as failure" appears in neither 2001 nor 2004 paper; it is Sakama's later gloss (claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-do-not-use-negation-as-failure-in-2001-2004-papers). Whether S&vL themselves ever use the term in the fuller, later development — the 2005 Cognitive Science suppression-task paper (the more probable home than the 2008 book, per the capture) or the 2008 MIT Press book — was not checked; those texts were not obtained. Left status: open for this residual; not forcing closure.