The psychological aspects of paraconsistency.

The creation of paraconsistent logics have expanded the boundaries of formal logic by introducing coherent systems that tolerate contradictions without triviality. Thanks to their novel approach and rigorous formalization they have already found many applications in computer science, linguistics and...

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Published in:Synthese Vol. 199; no. 1/2; pp. 4393 - 4415
Main Author: Rudnicki, Konrad
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Dec2021
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        10.1007/s11229-020-02983-8
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        atl: The psychological aspects of paraconsistency.
      aug:
        au: Rudnicki, Konrad
        affil: Department of Communication Science, University of Antwerp, Antwerp, Belgium
      su:
        Cognitive dissonance
        Cognitive psychology
        Psychologists
        Point processes
        Application software
        Cognitive neuroscience
      sug:
        subj:
          Cognitive dissonance
          Cognitive psychology
          Psychologists
          Point processes
          Application software
          Cognitive neuroscience
      keyword:
        Contradiction
        Dialetheism
        Inconsistency
        Paraconsistency
        Psychologism
        Reasoning
      ab: The creation of paraconsistent logics have expanded the boundaries of formal logic by introducing coherent systems that tolerate contradictions without triviality. Thanks to their novel approach and rigorous formalization they have already found many applications in computer science, linguistics and mathematics. As a natural next step, some philosophers have also tried to answer the question if human everyday reasoning could be accurately modelled with paraconsistent logics. The purpose of this article is to argue against the notion that human reasoning is paraconsistent. Numerous findings in the area of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience go against the hypothesis that humans tolerate contradictions in their inferences. Humans experience severe stress and confusion when confronted with contradictions (i.e., the so-called cognitive dissonance). Experiments on the ways in which humans process contradictions point out that the first thing humans do is remove or modify one of the contradictory statements. From an evolutionary perspective, contradiction is useless and even more dangerous than lack of information because it takes up resources to process. Furthermore, it appears that when logicians, anthropologists or psychologists provide examples of contradictions in human culture and behaviour, their examples very rarely take the form of: (p ∧ ¬ p) . Instead, they are often conditional statements, probabilistic judgments, metaphors or seemingly incompatible beliefs. At different points in time humans are definitely able to hold contradictory beliefs, but within one reasoning leading to a particular behaviour, contradiction is never tolerated.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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      custom: Synthese is a copyright of Springer, 2021. All Rights Reserved.
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