“Ragionamento di senso comune, teorie del”

The inquiry on common sense reasoning follows the previous one on mathematical and scientific reasoning, carried out from a logical point of view, especially during the XX century. The result is a widening of the attempt to theorize and formalize such a complex subject, with the contribution not only of philosophers and logicians, but also of scholars of cognitive sciences, with an empirical interest. After a presentation of the general framework of the subject, this long entry of the Enciclopedia Filosofica Bompiani takes into account the specific characteristics of common sense reasoning. The interactions among artificial intelligence, logic and psychology are explored. Special attention is devoted to the formalization of non-monotonic reasoning, as initiated by J. McCarthy in the fifties and sixties of last century. Non-monotonic logic attempts to formalize the ways human reasoning is able to review its conclusions in the presence of new information. At the end the entry takes into consideration the theory of mental models (TMM) of Philip N. Johnson-Laird, a research program based on the assumption that reasoning is essentially a semantic process. TMM aims at understanding how the mind performs different forms of thinking, also with the purpose of building possible computational models.