Propositional thought and truth-functional reasoning

Despite widespread practice in cognitive and comparative psychology to ascribe beliefs and other propositional attitudes to very young children and non-human animals, the nature of such attitudes remains a matter of controversy. Some have suggested that they might involve imagistic or map-like representations rather than propositional ones. Others have emphasized the difficulty of individuating the concepts possessed and entertained by minimally verbal and non-verbal subjects and went on to question the accuracy and legitimacy of ascriptions of propositional attitudes to them. As truth-functional reasoning involves representational mechanism that go beyond the demonstrative-governed mechanisms characteristic of perception, the capacity for truth-functional reasoning is often taken to be a sign of propositional thought. Recent empirical research provides some evidence of truth-functional reasoning in non-human animals and young children, as the studies on children’s use of denial-negation and disjunctive syllogism in both animals and children illustrate. Nevertheless, in many cases explanations not involving propositional thought and deductive reasoning have been proposed by sceptics.

In the third ARED workshop we engage with the issue of propositional thought and ascriptions thereof in non-verbal and minimally verbal subjects, together with its relation to truth-functional reasoning.

Participation can be online or in person. Please register here or send an email to ared@stir.ac.uk by January 24^th 2024, indicating whether you wish to attend in person or online.