Miguel López-Astorga
Biographic Data
| ID | 1612205 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Miguel López-Astorga |
| GIVEN NAMES | Miguel |
| FAMILY NAME | López-Astorga |
| SIGNATURE | LÓPEZ-ASTORGA M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Talca |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-6004-0587 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
Modus Tollendo Tollens with obligation conditionals: Towards a deontic inheritance logic respecting the Stoic criterion
We know that Modus Tollendo Tollens is a difficult rule to apply. We also know that there are circumstances in which people easily use it. One of those circumstances is whenever the conditional premise is an obligation conditional. On the other hand, the Stoic criterion of the conditional, that is, the proposal Chrysippus of Soli gave for the latter logical connective, has been related to Non-Axiomatic Logic and Inheritance Logic. My aim here is …
Semantic ambiguity does not imply syntactic ambiguity
A problem to solve in generative grammar is to account for why children are able to note when a sentence or expression is ambiguous, even if they have not received explicit training for that. The theory of mental models can give an explanation in that way. That explanation is based upon the idea that people interpret linguistic messages by considering the semantics models corresponding to them, and it has been also proposed that the syntactic str…
A lógica de Buridan: Testabilidade e modelos
A teoria da modalidade que Buridan desenvolve está vinculada com diferentes proposições. Este trabalho aborda uma dessas proposições. O objetivo é mostrar que, se o operador de necessidade incluído nela é ignorado, a proposição permite derivar, dentro da lógica de predicados de primeira ordem, uma sentença de redução com as características requeridas no framework de Carnap. Ademais, o artigo tenta argumentar que o mencionado operador de necessida…
Employing a Mental Model Framework to Explore Systems Thinking
This article conceptualizes systems thinking from the perspective of mental models. It portrays systems thinking as a combination of perception, prior knowledge and reasoning processes for guiding decision‐making in complex, dynamic situations. Systems thinking is mostly considered as a skill, and assessment instruments are based on the observable products of thinking. However, there is a lack of research on the cognitive processes involved in ge…
The reduction sentences are easy even within a Popperian view
Rudolf Carnap proposed three reduction rules to improve scientific language. Those rules indicate when it is correct to add a property in situations in which other properties are already had. Assuming the theory of mental models, it has been shown that the rules are not hard to use from the cognitive point of view. The key to argue that is to accept that the human mind works as dual-process theories claim. According to these theories, people can …
Modulation and the underlying assumptions of the Pythagorean ban against eating broad beans
This paper tries to show that the theory of mental models describes deep mental processes that have to be assumed even by frameworks contrary to it. It has been argued that many explanations on certain cognitive activities different from that provided by the theory of mental models cannot ignore theses of this last approach. Those theses are related to the way the human mind interprets linguistic information and makes inferences. The main goal he…
Jaina logic: A model-based analysis of the seven predications
A relevant part of Jainism is its logic. Jaina logic gives tools to communicate and argue. However, it is problematic from the western perspective: it seems to be a paraconsistent system, that is, a system in which a fact and the denial of that very fact can be true at once. Those difficulties have been overtaken from interpretations that ignore classical standard logic and assess Jaina logic from a point of view more linked to reasoning and the …
The suppression task and first‐order predicate calculus
The suppression task challenges classical logic. Classical logic is monotonic. However, in the suppression task, an inference with the form of modus ponendo ponens is inhibited by adding a new premise. Several explanations have been given to account for this fact. The present paper indicates three of them as examples: that of the theory of mental models, that based on logic programming and closed world assumption, and that referring to Carnap's c…
Induction: Possibilities, frequency, and confidence
The theory of mental models describes how human beings often make inductive inferences. That account is based on possibilities. It claims that, in inductions, people tend to prefer the possibility that seems to be more probable. The present paper tries to develop the account by proposing an additional quantitative method to determine which of the two possibilities in inductive processes is preferable. The paper resorts to a Non-Axiomatic Logic: N…
Paradoxical inferences, biconditional interpretation, and exclusivity
Two inferences correct in classical logic are controversial in cognitive science. The reason is that people do not always deem them as valid inferences. One of them is the rule to introduce a conditional. The other one is the rule to introduce a disjunction. The theory of mental models has an account for them. Their conclusions refer to models, and, in both cases, one of those models is inconsistent with the premise. When semantics modulates and …
Confirmation of conditionals and Carnap’s reduction sentences
Given that the material conditional can be true in three different situations, an empirical datum can confirm different conditionals. In fact, the same datum can confirm even conditionals that appear to be in contradiction with each other. By means of an example presented by Khemlani, Byrne, and Johnson-Laird, this issue is addressed below. To do that, the present paper resorts to the concept of reduction sentence offered by Carnap. The conclusio…
The probability of conditionals: A review
Severe Acute Hepatitis in Children: An Analysis from Philosophy of Science Using the Concept of Reduction
The present paper uses Carnap’s reduction concept to address the problem of new severe acute hepatitis in children. First, it tries to show how that concept can help understand why some previous hypotheses of causality on the new hepatitis in children should be rejected. Second, Carnap’s reduction concept is used to explain a complex hypothesis about the causes of that disease proposed in The Lancet in 2022. The latter hypothesis combines several…
Pronouns, variables, and their positions
A topic generative grammar has addressed is that of the leftness condition. This condition appears to show that people tend not to relate pronouns and variables in the same sentence whenever the pronoun is to the left of the variable. This approach is basically syntactic. The present paper tries to move to a more semantic framework: that of the theory of mental models. This theory considers the meanings of the words in sentences to be essential. …
Execution in selection task depends on Chrysippus’ criterion for the conditional
Wason’s selection task is a current cognitive problem. It is a reasoning task including a conditional sentence that only sometimes is correctly solved by participants. It has been claimed that the versions of the task that are often properly executed are only those in which the conditional sentence fulfills the criterion given by Chrysippus of Soli for the conditional. In this paper, this point is checked by considering a relevant number of versi…
Compound nouns do not always fulfill the conjunction thesis: An analysis using the mental model theory
This paper is intended to show that the properties classical logic attributes to conjunction are not always found in real compound nouns in natural language. This fact is described by means of several examples taken from different natural languages. The main conclusion is that perhaps a better option to understand human language and communicative phenomena is to assume a basically semantic approach with the mental model theory proposed as a more …
The ten kinds of conditionals and Chrysippus’ criterion
The theory of mental models proposed ten possible interpretations for the conditional. In particular, Johnson-Laird and Byrne provided those interpretations in 2002. On the other hand, in ancient times, Chrysippus of Soli claimed that conditionals have to fulfill a requirement: the negation of their consequents must be inconsistent with their antecedents. This paper considers the ten interpretations of the conditional the theory of mental models …
Stoic Logic Allows Understanding a Priori Falsity in the Conditional
An issue to explain in cognitive science is nowadays the case of certain conditionals that people seem to deem as a priori false. Those conditionals appear to be false by virtue of semantics: the meanings of their antecedents and their consequents seem not to admit any link between them. This is a problem because, from the point of view of classical logic, they are not always false; there can be situations in which they are true (as classical log…
The real interpretations of ‘if’ in academic texts: A study of the possibilities corresponding to the conditional in a psychology paper
Johnson-Laird and Byrne proposed in 2002 that, beyond the two traditional interpretations that are assigned to if, that is, the material and the biconditional ones, eight more combinations of possibilities related to their meaning can be attributed to this kind of sentences. The initial hypothesis in the present study is that not all of those ten interpretations should be usual in academic texts, since some of them resort, for example, to figurat…
Inputs from Philosophy to Cognitive Science: The Example of L-concepts and the Suppression Task
Although it is many times said that progress can be observed in none of the different subfields that are part of philosophy, this paper is intended to show otherwise by means of an example. That example is based upon the L-concepts that are introduced by Carnap in his method of extension and intension, and it refers to the idea that the underlying machinery of this last method is able to solve problems such as those that reasoning exercises such …
Logical Forms Depend on Semantic Models: The Illusory Disjunctive Sentences as Pieces of Evidence
A teoria dos modelos mentais é capaz de explicar um amplo espectro de fatos relacionados à cognição. No entanto, pode-se pensar que o problema com essa teoria do ponto de vista linguístico é que ela ignora a forma lógica e, portanto, a sintaxe. Foi proposto que existem maneiras de vincular a teoria dos modelos mentais a estruturas formais. Contudo, permanece um problema em propostas desse tipo: a detecção de formas lógicas sempre parece depender …
Adquisición del lenguaje y capacidades cognitivas innatas: Un enfoque desde la teoría de los modelos mentales
Según Hornstein, la gramática generativa necesita ofrecer una explicación del hecho deque los niños pueden aprender cualquier idioma viviendo en contextos con muchas limitaciones ydeficiencias desde el punto de vista lingüístico. Piensa que las teorías inductivas no son capaces deaclarar cómo acontece el aprendizaje con tales limitaciones y deficiencias. Del mismo modo, en suopinión, las teorías semánticas no muestran por qué la semántica es nece…
Analytic Sentences, Cognition, and Language: Some Links between Current Theories
This paper tries to explore possible relations and differences between three kinds of contemporary theories about cognition and language: the approaches supporting the idea that there is a mental logic, the mental models theory, and the frameworks based upon probability logic. That exploration is made here by means of the analytic sentences and the revision of the way each of those types of theories can deal with them. The conclusions seem to sho…
Hidden premises in an argument by Deng Xi: The action of pragmatics according to the syntactic theories
The syntactic theories trying to describe human reasoning, communication, and language often claim that the role played by pragmatics basically consists of providing hidden premises that help one draw conclusions. Obviously, this is a very strong assumption. However, this paper is intended to show that there are arguments used by people that cannot be understood without such premises, and that hence they confirm that assumption. This is done by r…
The Problem of the Negation of the Conditional
People usually seem to negate the conditional in a different way as it is provided by standard logic. Both contemporary experimental results and texts coming from ancient sources appear to demonstrate that individuals tend not to negate the conditionals in entirety, but only their consequents. Obviously, this can lead one to think that there is no relationship between standard logic and human language and reasoning. However, in this paper, I try …
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Existen Reglas Adaptativas en la Mente Humana? Una revisión crítica de las teorías cognitivas evolutivas por medio del enfoque de la perfección del condicional
Social contracts theory is a cognitive approach that emerged decades ago and holds that human mind has\nevolved neurocognitive systems. These systems regulate different social situations, for example, exchanges\nand contracts, and allow detecting offenders and individuals that do not fulfill agreements. In this paper, I\ncheck critically the theses of this approach by means of the Moldovan's linguistic arguments about\nconditional perfection. In …
Heurísticos y racionalidad: La ignorancia beneficia a los estudiantes en algún sentido
Gigerenzer (2007) piensa que la mente humana no es racional, es decir, que no opera siguiendo las prescripciones de la lógica formal. Para demostrarlo, presenta diversos ejemplos del razonamiento de las personas en situaciones cotidianas. En este trabajo, revisamos uno de los ejemplos presentados por Gigerenzer (2007) en este sentido, lo analizamos críticamente y llegamos a dos conclusiones: i) no demuestra que la mente humana es irracional; y ii…
Revictimización y Procesamiento de la Información: Problemas en el estudio de las dificultades de razonamiento
DePrince establece relaciones entre problemas como la disociación, la revictimización y ciertas dificultades en la cognición social. En concreto, afirma que las personas que padecen de disociación o que han sufrido, según su propio testimonio, episodios de revictimización manifiestan evidentes dificultades para resolver tareas de selección planteadas como contratos sociales o como problemas de precaución. En nuestra opinión, esto significa que, s…
Dificultades de la lógica deóntica: El Problema De Las Tareas Abstractas
La propuesta relativa a que existe una lógica deóntica con la que los seres humanos operan en algunos dominios tiene que solucionar el problema de los discretos resultados de las tareas de selección deónticas abstractas. En una investigación reciente, se ha tratado de resolver este problema argumentando que las tareas de selección deónticas abstractas suelen ir acompañadas de instrucciones ambiguas que no son fáciles de interpretar y planteando a…
A formal theory can explain disjunctive illusory inferences
There are disjunctive inferences that can be considered to be illusory, since, when faced to them, people tend to draw logically incorrect conclusions. The mental models theory can explain this problem by distinguishing between mental models and fully explicit models. According to it, individuals often derive only conclusions compatible with the mental models, and not with the fully explicit models. However, I try to show in this paper that a syn…
La Problemática Acerca de la Conclusión del Silogismo de la Primera Figura
Espino and Santamaria experimentally demonstrate that, if the syllogisms in the first figure are not presented as is the usual practice, that is, separating their two premises into two different lines, but linking the two premises into one line by means of a full stop, individuals tend to draw from such premises conclusions in which the subject and the predicate are not in the customary order, but rotated.In their view, this finding is consistent…
Mental logic and its difficulties with disjunction
The mental logic theory does not accept the disjunction introduction rule of standard propositional calculus as a natural schema of the human mind. In this way, the problem that I want to show in this paper is that, however, that theory does admit another much more complex schema in which the mentioned rule must be used as a previous step. So, I try to argue that this is a very important problem that the mental logic theory needs to solve, and cl…
Resúmenes proyectos de investigación en psicología Financiamiento fondo nacional de desarrollo científico y tecnológico - Fondecyt aprobados año 2011
Durante el año 2011 se resolvieron los concursos FONDECYT regular 2012 y de Iniciación a la investigación 2011. En el concurso de Iniciación a la Investigación, se presentaron 525 proyectos, de los cuales fueron aprobaron 262. De estos, 7 corresponden a Psicología (de un total de 12 proyectos postulados), por un valor de 322.630 millones de pesos, lo que constituye el 2,3% del total del financiamiento otorgado en esta categoría. En el concurso re…
Mental Logic and the Denials of Conjunctions and Disjunctions
The mental models theory predicts that, while conjunctions are easier than disjunctions for individuals, when denied, conjunctions are harder than disjunctions. Khemlani, Orenes, and Johnson-Laird proved that this prediction is correct in their work of 2014. In this paper, I analyze their results in order to check whether or not they really affect the mental logic theory. My conclusion is that, although Khemlani et al.'s study provides important …
Hidden premises in an argument by Deng Xi: The action of pragmatics according to the syntactic theories
The syntactic theories trying to describe human reasoning, communication, and language often claim that the role played by pragmatics basically consists of providing hidden premises that help one draw conclusions. Obviously, this is a very strong assumption. However, this paper is intended to show that there are arguments used by people that cannot be understood without such premises, and that hence they confirm that assumption. This is done by r…
The Problem of the Negation of the Conditional
People usually seem to negate the conditional in a different way as it is provided by standard logic. Both contemporary experimental results and texts coming from ancient sources appear to demonstrate that individuals tend not to negate the conditionals in entirety, but only their consequents. Obviously, this can lead one to think that there is no relationship between standard logic and human language and reasoning. However, in this paper, I try …
Adquisición del lenguaje y capacidades cognitivas innatas: Un enfoque desde la teoría de los modelos mentales
Según Hornstein, la gramática generativa necesita ofrecer una explicación del hecho deque los niños pueden aprender cualquier idioma viviendo en contextos con muchas limitaciones ydeficiencias desde el punto de vista lingüístico. Piensa que las teorías inductivas no son capaces deaclarar cómo acontece el aprendizaje con tales limitaciones y deficiencias. Del mismo modo, en suopinión, las teorías semánticas no muestran por qué la semántica es nece…
Analytic Sentences, Cognition, and Language: Some Links between Current Theories
This paper tries to explore possible relations and differences between three kinds of contemporary theories about cognition and language: the approaches supporting the idea that there is a mental logic, the mental models theory, and the frameworks based upon probability logic. That exploration is made here by means of the analytic sentences and the revision of the way each of those types of theories can deal with them. The conclusions seem to sho…
The real interpretations of ‘if’ in academic texts: A study of the possibilities corresponding to the conditional in a psychology paper
Johnson-Laird and Byrne proposed in 2002 that, beyond the two traditional interpretations that are assigned to if, that is, the material and the biconditional ones, eight more combinations of possibilities related to their meaning can be attributed to this kind of sentences. The initial hypothesis in the present study is that not all of those ten interpretations should be usual in academic texts, since some of them resort, for example, to figurat…
Inputs from Philosophy to Cognitive Science: The Example of L-concepts and the Suppression Task
Although it is many times said that progress can be observed in none of the different subfields that are part of philosophy, this paper is intended to show otherwise by means of an example. That example is based upon the L-concepts that are introduced by Carnap in his method of extension and intension, and it refers to the idea that the underlying machinery of this last method is able to solve problems such as those that reasoning exercises such …
Logical Forms Depend on Semantic Models: The Illusory Disjunctive Sentences as Pieces of Evidence
A teoria dos modelos mentais é capaz de explicar um amplo espectro de fatos relacionados à cognição. No entanto, pode-se pensar que o problema com essa teoria do ponto de vista linguístico é que ela ignora a forma lógica e, portanto, a sintaxe. Foi proposto que existem maneiras de vincular a teoria dos modelos mentais a estruturas formais. Contudo, permanece um problema em propostas desse tipo: a detecção de formas lógicas sempre parece depender …
Pronouns, variables, and their positions
A topic generative grammar has addressed is that of the leftness condition. This condition appears to show that people tend not to relate pronouns and variables in the same sentence whenever the pronoun is to the left of the variable. This approach is basically syntactic. The present paper tries to move to a more semantic framework: that of the theory of mental models. This theory considers the meanings of the words in sentences to be essential. …
Execution in selection task depends on Chrysippus’ criterion for the conditional
Wason’s selection task is a current cognitive problem. It is a reasoning task including a conditional sentence that only sometimes is correctly solved by participants. It has been claimed that the versions of the task that are often properly executed are only those in which the conditional sentence fulfills the criterion given by Chrysippus of Soli for the conditional. In this paper, this point is checked by considering a relevant number of versi…
Compound nouns do not always fulfill the conjunction thesis: An analysis using the mental model theory
This paper is intended to show that the properties classical logic attributes to conjunction are not always found in real compound nouns in natural language. This fact is described by means of several examples taken from different natural languages. The main conclusion is that perhaps a better option to understand human language and communicative phenomena is to assume a basically semantic approach with the mental model theory proposed as a more …
The ten kinds of conditionals and Chrysippus’ criterion
The theory of mental models proposed ten possible interpretations for the conditional. In particular, Johnson-Laird and Byrne provided those interpretations in 2002. On the other hand, in ancient times, Chrysippus of Soli claimed that conditionals have to fulfill a requirement: the negation of their consequents must be inconsistent with their antecedents. This paper considers the ten interpretations of the conditional the theory of mental models …
Stoic Logic Allows Understanding a Priori Falsity in the Conditional
An issue to explain in cognitive science is nowadays the case of certain conditionals that people seem to deem as a priori false. Those conditionals appear to be false by virtue of semantics: the meanings of their antecedents and their consequents seem not to admit any link between them. This is a problem because, from the point of view of classical logic, they are not always false; there can be situations in which they are true (as classical log…
Confirmation of conditionals and Carnap’s reduction sentences
Given that the material conditional can be true in three different situations, an empirical datum can confirm different conditionals. In fact, the same datum can confirm even conditionals that appear to be in contradiction with each other. By means of an example presented by Khemlani, Byrne, and Johnson-Laird, this issue is addressed below. To do that, the present paper resorts to the concept of reduction sentence offered by Carnap. The conclusio…
The probability of conditionals: A review
Severe Acute Hepatitis in Children: An Analysis from Philosophy of Science Using the Concept of Reduction
The present paper uses Carnap’s reduction concept to address the problem of new severe acute hepatitis in children. First, it tries to show how that concept can help understand why some previous hypotheses of causality on the new hepatitis in children should be rejected. Second, Carnap’s reduction concept is used to explain a complex hypothesis about the causes of that disease proposed in The Lancet in 2022. The latter hypothesis combines several…
Modulation and the underlying assumptions of the Pythagorean ban against eating broad beans
This paper tries to show that the theory of mental models describes deep mental processes that have to be assumed even by frameworks contrary to it. It has been argued that many explanations on certain cognitive activities different from that provided by the theory of mental models cannot ignore theses of this last approach. Those theses are related to the way the human mind interprets linguistic information and makes inferences. The main goal he…
Philosophy (27 works) · Computer Science (22 works) · Psychology (22 works) · Mathematics (16 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Artificial Intelligence (12 works) · Linguistics (12 works) · Cognitive science (8 works) · Humanities (8 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (8 works)