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This chapter begins with an outline of logic and of the attempts to use it as a theory of human deduction. The fatal impediments to this approach led to the model theory in which models based on the meanings of premises yield deductive conclusions. And the chapter describes in detail the implementation of this theory’s account of deductions based on sentential connectives such as “if,” and how this simulation led to the discovery of systematic but compelling fallacies.The chapter outlines how algorithms based on models simulate deductions of the spatial relations among objects. And it points out the problems that need to be solved to extend accounts of elementary inferences from quantified assertions to deal with multiply-quantified relations. One alternative to the model theory is the idea that human deduction relies on probabilities. This approach concerns only which inferences people make, not the underlying mental processes by which they are made. The model theory fills the gap, because it applies to the deductions of probabilities, both those based on frequencies or proportions, and those based on evidence pertinent to unique events. The chapter ends with an account of why theories of human deduction need to be simulated in computer programs.
The application of the word ‘development’ to a fully formulated principle of temporal Order becomes ubiquitous in Rousseau’s Emile. The biologist Buffon, the psychologist Condillac and particularly Bonnet all influenced this seminal treatise. But where they had written of development only occasionally and in an abstract sense, with Rousseau it becomes normative and the main descriptor of the structured lifespan of the individual. Rousseau retains the older sense of development as the ‘unfolding’ of an already existing, preformed structure; nevertheless, he also reveals in outline the modern human sciences’ presupposition that the child is an incomplete being. Thanks to Bayle and Diderot, Rousseau derived his concept of a political General Will, irrespective of the individual will, from that of God’s general will to save humankind that does not take individual behaviours into account; this has its psychological equivalent in Rousseau’s creation of ‘the abstract man’, against whose developmental norms the individual must be measured.
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