LanCog seminar: Salvador Mascarenhas on questions in the logic of thought
Ricardo Santos
SEMINAR SERIES IN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY
2025-26: Session 17
Questions in the Language and Logic of Thought
Salvador Mascarenhas (École Normale Supérieure, Institut Jean-Nicod)
6 March 2026, 16:00 (Lisbon Time – WET)
Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa
Sala Mattos Romão [C201.J] (Departamento de Filosofia)
Abstract: When making decisions, humans manipulate mental representations of relevant accessible facts to produce new representations which support one or another course of action. At first glance, we would expect these mental representations to correspond precisely to our best independent guess as to what symbolic systems best support rationality: classical logic and classical probability theory. Yet, there is ample evidence from natural-language semantics that various non-classical symbolic systems provide theories of natural-language meaning that have at least the same empirical coverage as classical theories, while providing explanatory insights into meaning which are inaccessible to classical theories. Might this mean that mental representations more generally have the very non-classical properties found in investigations of linguistic meaning? In this talk I argue that they do. I give two case studies which illustrate how a non-classical account of disjunction based on theories of question meanings can shine light on puzzles of human reasoning and decision making, in particular the puzzles of reasoning by representativeness studied by Tversky and Kahneman. I conclude with preliminary but highly suggestive evidence that these kinds of non-classical mental representations are involved in causal representation and inference.
All are welcome, in-person!