Understanding and evaluating everyday human reasoning and thinking. A logico-philosophical study aiming at the articulation of dynamic formal languages, dynamic interpretations of linguistic entities, and dynamic formal systems.

Period 01-10-2001 to 30-09-2005
Type Predoctoral Fellowship
Promotor(s) Prof. Dr. Diderik Batens
Fellow Liza Verhoeven
Funding agency Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO)

The development of logics is intended to obtain formalizations of human reasoning processes. The project focusses on a characteristic that has been insufficiently studied in the past, viz. dynamics aspects of reasoning. First, dynamic reasoning mechanisms will be extracted from real life texts (from the sciences as well as from everyday contexts). Next, formal languages will be designed that enable one to more adequately formalize sentences from natural languages with respect to context dependence and with respect to the time dependence of the meanings of words and expressions. Third, formal logics will be articulated that make use of the possibilities of the new formal languages and that reveal the extracted mechanisms. Fourth, it will be shown by applications that the new logics are capable to explicate more characteristic dynamic aspects of human reasoning than available logics and methods.