Logic and Cognition: Special Issue of Best Papers of the ESSLLI 2012 Workshop

Abstract

The explanatory power of logic is vast and therefore it has proved a valuable tool for many disciplines, including the building-blocks of cognitive science, such as philosophy, computer science, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and linguistics. Logic has a great track record in providing interesting insights by means of formalization, and as such it is very useful in disambiguating psychological theories. Logically formalized cognitive theories are not only the source of unequivocal experimental hypotheses, but they also lend themselves naturally to computational modeling. Most importantly, modern logic has at its service a rich variety of tools to assess and compare such psychological theories. This toolbox can be utilized in evaluating cognitive models along the following dimensions: (a) logical relationships, for example, incompatibility or identity of models; (b) explanatory power, for example, what can be expressed by means of a model? (c) computational plausibility, for example, are computations postulated by cognitive models tractable, do they scale-up? In this way, logic can play a major role in the process of psychological explanation. For some interesting examples, see Stenning and van Lambalgen (2008). Marr (1983) has argued that any particular task computed by a cognitive system must ultimately be analyzed at three levels of explanation (in order of decreasing abstraction)