Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

When are Humans Reasoning with Modus Tollens?

Creative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
Abstract

Modus tollens is a rule of inference in classical, two-valued logic which allows to derive the negation of the antecedent from a conditional and the negation of its consequent. In this paper, we investigate when humans draw such conclusions and what modulates the application of modus tollens. We consider conditionals which may or may not be obligations and which may or may not have necessary antecedents. We show that humans make significantly more modus tollens inferences in case of obligation conditionals and that the time to make a modus tollens inference is shorter than the time to answer ``nothing follows''. We illustrate how these differences can be modeled within the weak completion semantics.

Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Current View