Logic in Language and Thought

Catalog description

Does logic only dictate how people ought to reason or can it also describe how human reasoning naturally works? In linguistics, the best theories of how language conveys meaning propose that word meanings have an abstract and formal logical structure. But in psychology, the best theories of people's reasoning argue that it is naturally flawed, biased, and deeply content-dependent rather than formal. In this course, we will explore this tension and work toward resolving it in order to understand whether and how much human reasoning really is inherently logical. We'll draw on existing research across the cognitive sciences, and come up with proposals of our own for what the next research steps might be.