Deontic Logic for Human Reasoning

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that deontic logic effectively models human reasoning, explaining variations in performance on reasoning tasks and showcasing the use of automated theorem proving as a reasoning tool.

Contribution

It introduces deontic logic models for human reasoning tasks and shows how automated theorem proving can be applied to deontic logic.

Findings

Deontic logic explains differences in human reasoning performance.

Automated theorem proving is effective for deontic logic reasoning.

Models successfully account for social contract reasoning variations.

Abstract

Deontic logic is shown to be applicable for modelling human reasoning. For this the Wason selection task and the suppression task are discussed in detail. Different versions of modelling norms with deontic logic are introduced and in the case of the Wason selection task it is demonstrated how differences in the performance of humans in the abstract and in the social contract case can be explained. Furthermore it is shown that an automated theorem prover can be used as a reasoning tool for deontic logic.