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