“Must” people reason logically with “permission” in daily situations? An explorative experimental investigation in human reasoning of normative concepts

Abstract

Philosophers have long been arguing the precise semantics of different deontic terms within normative statements. However, little research has been done on the human reasoning side of understanding such terms. In this paper, we have proposed a normative scheme with bitstring semantics that is expressive enough to cover the basic normative concepts in most mainstream schemes proposed in deontic logic research. Even though further confirmation is needed, our explorative experiments on human deontic reasoning have shown results that are consistent with our proposed scheme.