Soft Computing Evaluation Logic

2.2Observable Properties of Human Evaluation Logic

We understand human mental processes only slightly

better than a fish understands swimming.

—John McCarthy

The goal of logic is the study of valid reasoning. Consequently, the credibility of formal logic models depends on their compatibility with observable properties of human reasoning. The same holds for the whole area of perceptual computing. Consequently, before building evaluation logic models and perceptual computers we must first observe, identify, analyze and understand characteristic properties of human evaluation logic reasoning. After this first step we can try to develop mathematical models that describe those properties.

As a point of departure in this direction let us read an inspirational characterization of the study of mental processes written in 1847 by Augustus De Morgan in his seminal book Formal Logic or the Calculus of Inference Necessary and Probable [DEM47]:

With respect to the mind, considered as a complicated apparatus which is to be studied, we are not even so well off as those would be who had to examine and decide upon the mechanism of a watch, merely by observation of the functions of the hands, without being allowed to see the inside. A mechanician, to whom a watch was presented for the first time, would be able to give a good guess as to its structure, from his knowledge of other pieces of contrivance. As soon as he had examined the law of the motion of the hands, he might conceivably invent ...