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Carinthium comments on Does model theory [psychology] predict anything? (book: "How We Reason" (2009)) - Less Wrong
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Comments (27)
Does anybody actually make the daft claim that ordinary human reasoning follows patterns of formal logic? I've heard plenty of people make the claim that formal logic is the best way to reason properly (or at least that you should put your logic into valid argument claims), but nobody ever claiming that it fitted how humans generally operated.
Yes, several (mostly Dutch) people make that claim, and it's not a daft one. Don't confuse formal logic with classical logic!
I'm not sure what you are getting at here. Are you referencing Dutch booking? If so, I fail to see how that's relevant to Carinthium's question which is not about what is ideal reasoning but rather how humans actually reason.
No, I am literally referring to logicians in the present-day Netherlands. There are a bunch of people there who look into the use of (non-monotonic, highly non-classical) logics for modeling human reasoning, perhaps most prominently Michiel van Lambalgen.
Formal logic is a subset of arguments that are generally convincing to people. It's definitely not the best way to reason - that would be an ideal Bayesian - but it is a very good social standard for argumentation.
The term "formal logic" seems to be being used in several senses. I understand it refer to the branch of mathematics, but you seem to be using it to mean "rigorous reasoning". Most people would not understand a statement written in formal logic, according to the former definition, let alone find it convincing. And even with the latter meaning, there is much of formal logic that ordinary people find unconvincing, such as "The statement 'all crows are black' is logically equivalent to 'all non-black things are non-crows'; therefore, if I find something that isn't black, and it isn't a crow, that is support for the claim that all crows are black".