Journal of Philosophy and Theology

Reductio ad Absurdum, Modulation, and Logical Forms
Miguel López-Astorga

Abstract
There is a logical valid inference that people usually consider as incorrect and in which the Reduction ad Absurdum rule is involved. That inference consists of a premise and a conditional conclusion in which the antecedent is the denial of the premise. The mental models theory can explain this fact and why, in certain cases, individuals do accept the mentioned inference. However, it seems that the syntactic frameworks can only explain why people often reject the inference, but not why they admit it in some circumstances. In this paper, I try to show that individuals really never consider the indicated inference to be valid, that they only accept inferences similar to it, but not identical to it, and that it can hence be said that these problems do not prove that the syntactic approaches do not hold.

Full Text: PDF     DOI: 10.15640/ijpt.v3n1a7