Logic as a Foundation for a Cognitive Theory of Modality Assignment

Psychologists have tended to employ an anachronistically mechanistic view of logic in their theorising about human reasoning (see e.g., (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Rips, 1986)). Instead of regarding a logic as an abstract consequence relation which can be implemented in many mechanisms, they have tended to assume that a direct implementation of their favourite pencil-and-paper method of doing logic (often a natural deduction system) is the only mechanism of logical reasoning. Alternatively, some psychologists have claimed that psychological theories of reasoning correspond to model theory in logic, thus neglecting the fact that model theoretic reasoning generally takes place in some metalanguage.