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This paper is intended to address the work “Against logical form”, authored by Johnson-Laird in 2010. In it, based on the theory of mental models, Johnson-Laird claims that the way people interpret sentences in natural language has nothing to do with logic. This is because that action is not related to logical forms. According to him, the mental activity is mainly linked to semantics and pragmatics. However, here, following arguments provided by López-Astorga, I try to show that the theory of mental models can be linked to syntactic structures. My main point is made by dealing with an argument given in the mentioned Johnson-Laird’s paper. In principle, that argument seems to undermine proposals such as that of López-Astorga. However, the present work proposes otherwise.

The suppression task challenges classical logic. Classical logic is monotonic. However, in the suppression task, an inference with the form of modus ponendo ponens is inhibited by adding a new premise. Several explanations have been given to account for this fact. The present paper indicates three of them as examples: that of the theory of mental models, that based on logic programming and closed world assumption, and that referring to Carnap's concept of state‐descriptions. Besides, the paper offers one more explanation linked to Carnap's idea of reduction. It proposes sentences akin to a reduction sentence, a pair reduction, and a bilateral reduction sentence. Those sentences are related to the initial conditional in the suppression task. This proposal tries to stay within first‐order predicate logic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of mental models describes how human beings often make inductive inferences. That account is based on possibilities. It claims that, in inductions, people tend to prefer the possibility that seems to be more probable. The present paper tries to develop the account by proposing an additional quantitative method to determine which of the two possibilities in inductive processes is preferable. The paper resorts to a Non-Axiomatic Logic: NAL. NAL assigns quantitative values to the frequency and confidence of sentences. It also shows how those values can be transmitted from premises to conclusions in inductive inferences. This part of NAL is applied to the account of induction the theory of mental models gives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Praxis Filosófica is the property of Universidad del Valle and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The double negation has always been considered by the logical systems from ancient times to the present. In fact, that is an issue that the current syntactic theories studying human reasoning, for example, the mental logic theory, address today. However, in this paper, I claim that, in the case of some languages such as Spanish, the double negation causes problems for the cognitive theories mainly based on formal schemata and supporting the idea of a universal syntax of thought in the human mind. Thus, I propose that, given those problems, semantic frameworks such as that of the mental models theory seem to be more appropriate for explaining the human inferential activity.