Grolog/AI colloquium - Torben Bräuner - False-belief tests, modal logic, and language

In my talk I will describe ongoing work in the project Hybrid-Logical Proofs at Work in Cognitive Psychology: The major goal of this project is to use formal modal-logical proof-systems to analyze and give formalizations of psychological reasoning tests, in particular false-belief tests, and investigate empirical consequences of such logical analyses.

Formal proofs built according to the rules of proof-systems can be used to represent – describe the structure of – mathematical arguments as well as arguments in everyday human practice. An important part of the logical analyses of the project is to find out when two reasoning tasks have the same underlying logical structure, despite superficial dissimilarity, or conversely, have different logical structure, despite similarity.

Of particular interest are second-order false-belief tests in comparison to a version of so-called sentential complement tests, which lend themselves to logical analysis since they correspond to recursively embedded modal operators.