Probability Logic

TL;DR

This chapter explores probability logic as a normative framework for understanding human reasoning under uncertainty, highlighting its formal properties and comparing it to classical logic based on experimental evidence.

Contribution

It provides a formal analysis of probability logic's normative aspects and its relation to human reasoning, emphasizing its nonmonotonic and connexive features.

Findings

Probability logic generalizes classical propositional logic.

It is characterized as connexive and nonmonotonic.

Experimental evidence supports its descriptive validity.

Abstract

This chapter presents probability logic as a rationality framework for human reasoning under uncertainty. Selected formal-normative aspects of probability logic are discussed in the light of experimental evidence. Specifically, probability logic is characterized as a generalization of bivalent truth-functional propositional logic (short "logic"), as being connexive, and as being nonmonotonic. The chapter discusses selected argument forms and associated uncertainty propagation rules. Throughout the chapter, the descriptive validity of probability logic is compared to logic, which was used as the gold standard of reference for assessing the rationality of human reasoning in the 20th century.