Logic

Are logical inferences hardwired into our brains?

Comments

I suppose one could tell a story about the evolutionary advantage ofappreciating that "If a tiger is nearby, it's best to run" and "A tigeris nearby" together imply "It's best to run". Someone who doesn't graspthis inference is less likely to get down to the business ofprocreation than someone who does. (This isn't a justification of thisinference. Rather, I assumed the inference was correct and then offeredan evolutionary explanation based on that assumption for why humansmight find the inference compelling.) But logical inferences aren'thardwired in the sense that we have no choice at all about the kind oflogic we can adopt. See some of the responses to Question 168 fordiscussions of alternative logics.

One might add that it is by now well established that people are, in general, terrible at probabilistic reasoning. So if there's anything hard-wired in that case, it probably doesn't conform to the laws of probability. It's a nice question why not, but it might be, for example, that reasoning according to certain heuristics that don't always work is faster or what have you than reasoning according to the rules that are actually valid. Or maybe there's some other reason.

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