Deontic Logic for Human Reasoning
This work addresses the challenge of formalizing human reasoning for researchers in logic and cognitive science, but it appears incremental as it applies existing deontic logic to known tasks.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling human reasoning using deontic logic, demonstrating its applicability by explaining performance differences in tasks like the Wason selection task and showing that an automated theorem prover can serve as a reasoning tool for deontic logic.
Deontic logic is shown to be applicable for modelling human reasoning. For this the Wason selection task and the suppression task are discussed in detail. Different versions of modelling norms with deontic logic are introduced and in the case of the Wason selection task it is demonstrated how differences in the performance of humans in the abstract and in the social contract case can be explained. Furthermore it is shown that an automated theorem prover can be used as a reasoning tool for deontic logic.