Disjunction and access to knowledge: Educational implications

Abstract

In classical logic, it is possible to derive ‘either p or q’ from ‘p’ (where p and q are sentences with any content). This is a cognitive problem, since people often tend not to make inferences of that kind. This paper analyzes the solution the theory of mental models gives for this problem. Based on that solution, the paper proposes to use tasks with inferences such as that mentioned in the educational context. The idea is that those tasks can allow assessing certain learnings. In particular, they can reveal in some cases whether students understand the relations between the semantic contents assigned to p and q. This is because, following the theory of mental models, whenever q implies p, the inference must be accepted.