Deontic reasoning reviewed: psychological questions, empirical findings, and current theories

Abstract

Deontic reasoning is concerned with questions of whether actions are forbidden or allowed, obligatory or not obligatory. This article reviews empirical findings and psychological theories on deontic reasoning with regard to three questions that have guided psychological research during the last decades: How do people's deontic capabilities develop? How well do people perform in deontic reasoning tasks? And how do they represent deontic rules? In conclusion, it is discussed why deontic reasoning-despite astonishing, early developing competencies-is still a complex cognitive activity.

Interactively Illustrating the Context-Sensitivity of Aristotelian Diagrams

“…Let S be a logical system as specified in Definition 1 and let F be a fragment of S-contingent and pairwise non-S-equivalent formulas that is closed under negation. 2 An Aristotelian diagram for F in S is a diagram that visualizes an edge-labeled graph G. The vertices of G are the formulas of F, and the edges of G are labeled by the Aristotelian relations holding between those formulas, i.e. if ϕ, ψ ∈ F stand in some Aristotelian relation in S, then this is visualized according to the code in Fig.…”

“…In contemporary research, Aristotelian diagrams have been used in various subbranches of logic, such as modal logic [4], intuitionistic logic [29], epistemic logic [24], dynamic logic [9] and deontic logic [28], and also even in metalogical investigations [12]. Furthermore, because of the ubiquity of the logical relations that they visualize, these diagrams are also often used in fields outside of pure logic, such as cognitive science [2,30,34], linguistics [1,17,41,43], philosophy [27,44], law [20,31,45] and computer science [10,13,15]. In sum, then, it seems fair to conclude that Aristotelian diagrams have come to serve "as a kind of lingua franca" [19, p. 81] for a highly interdisciplinary community of researchers who are all concerned, in some way or another, with logical reasoning.…”

Alcoholism and Conditional Reasoning: Difficulties in Specific Mental Domains or in the General Use of Heuristics?

“…It is evident that, starting from different preconceptions, there can be different conclusions about the cognitive fields or the reasoning abilities that, according to the same results, can present problems in alcoholic people. Besides, there are some other particularly interesting papers such as the ones of Beller (2010) and of Beller and Spada (2003), from which it is inferred that, even if it can be proved that the specific domains of reasoning exist, as those suggested by the social contracts theory and the hazard management theory, it could never be proven that those domains have been developed in virtue of the human process of adaptation to the environment because there is always a chance that they were acquired by the educational process of every individual. Another relevant study is the one of Girotto and Tentori (2008), in which it was observed that it is very difficult to find a subject that correctly solves a version of the selection task with a rule that does not express a relation of social exchange and incorrectly solves a version where the rule expresses such relation, which means that, in some way, the general reasoning ability is also implied in the execution of versions with rules in terms of social exchange.…”

“…Although some of the heuristics with which it counts can be innate, it seems that most of them come from experience, which means that, when a logical and analytical activity of T2 is repeated a considerable amount of times, it can be automated, it can become a heuristic and be realised in a relatively quick way. If it is considered that Stanovich (2012) seems to place in T1 the cause of the versions of the selection task with rules in terms of social interaction or hazardous situation to be adequately answered by arguing that individuals respond to them according to their heuristics, this is not absolutely incompatible with proposals as those of Griggs (1983), Pollard (1981Pollard ( , 1982, Beller and Spada (2003) or Beller (2010), which refer to the subject's previous experiences.…”

Lógica deóntica y algoritmos adaptativos: La relevancia del beneficio explícito en las versiones de la tarea de selección

“…No podemos olvidar tampoco, a este respecto, planteamientos como los expuestos en Beller y Spada (2003) o en Beller (2010). En estos últimos trabajos, se expone que, incluso aceptando la existencia de los algoritmos mentales propuestos por la teoría de los contratos sociales, nunca, por más experimentos que ideemos y que llevemos a la práctica, podremos estar seguros de que tales algoritmos se encuentran en nuestra mente como resultado de nuestro proceso evolutivo de adaptación al medio, pues siempre cabe la posibilidad de que hayamos adquirido tales algoritmos por aprendizaje, a lo largo de nuestra vida individual y en virtud de la educación o la enseñanza recibida.…”