Mental Logic and How to Discover It
Martin D. S. Braine · 1994
Abstract Before considering empirical ways of discovering what is in the mental logic, it seems a necessary preliminary, in order to avoid seeming to beg the question, that I discuss reasons why it is plausible to expect there to be a mental logic, and what sort of mental logic those reasons should lead one to expect. So I begin with these sorts of preliminaries, and they will, I hope, situate the concept of a mental logic in a theoretical frame work within which it makes sense. In the second section of the paper I briefly defend the notion that there must be a mental logic against two currents of today’s cognitive psychological scene which have both been generally hostile to the idea of a mental logic–one a claim (that all reasoning is based on mental models), and the other a highly visible line of work (connectionism). Then, in the third section I tum to the main question in the paper.