This talk will present a model of causal cognition based on abductive reasoning. We will show how this kind of reasoning is systematically used in our cognition to establish causality, when we try to explain past events and predict future events. Contrary to what is usually held, our causal reasoning is not deductive, it is abductive and it is so because it relies mainly on our long-term memory and supports our decision-making. Treating causal cognition as abduction, we propose a new interpretation of important experiments in the cognitive psychology of reasoning, that is the Wason cards selection tasks and their variations in experiments on alternative antecedents and on disablers. This will lead us to a modeling of the dynamics of causal reasoning and of the learning procedures at work in human causal cognition. Finally, we will be able to apply our analysis to the dual-process theory and show how spontaneous S1 procedures treat abductive causal cognition with a certain dogmatism and closed-minded thinking, while reflective S2 procedures manage causal cognition with caution and an open mind. As a conclusion, we will characterize how we can and should deal with causality in a rational manner.    

References

Robert, S. & Brisson, J. (2016) The Klein Group, Squares of Opposition and the Explanation of Fallacies in Reasoning. Logica Universalis, Springer Birkhäuser, volume 10, issue 2-3, p. 377-392.

Evans, J. St B. T., Newstead, S. E. and Byrne, R. M. J. (1993). Human Reasoning: The Psychology of Deduction. Hove UK: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Chapter 2.

Stenning, K & van Lambalgen, M. (2008). Human Reasoning and Cognitive Science. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Robert, S., Faghihi, U., Barkaoui, Y., & Ghazzali, N. (2020). Causality in probabilistic fuzzy logic and alternative causes as fuzzy duals. In Advances in Computational Collective Intelligence: 12th International Conference, ICCCI 2020, Da Nang, Vietnam, November 30–December 3, 2020, Proceedings 12 (pp. 767-776). Springer International Publishing.

Faghihi, U., Robert, S., Poirier, P., & Barkaoui, Y. (2020, May). From association to reasoning, an alternative to pearls’ causal reasoning. In The Thirty-Third International Flairs Conference.