I’d guess that getting this question “correct” almost requires having been trained to parse the problem in a certain formal way — namely, purely in terms of propositional logic.
Indeed.
The propositional-logic reading (the one endorsed by the OP) might be more natural if, for you, “learning about the world” means “learning more about the complicated conjunction-and-disjunction of propositions that precisely carves out the actual world from among the possible worlds.”
In fact, when I got to this part, I actually skipped the rest of the article, thinking, “What sort of halfway competent cognitive scientist actually proposes that we represent the world using first-order symbolic logic? Where’s the statistical content?”
Hopefully I’m not being too harsh there, but I think we know enough about learning in the abstract and its relation to actually-existing human cognition to ditch purely formal theories in favor of expecting that any good theory of cognition should be able to show statistical behavior.
Indeed.
In fact, when I got to this part, I actually skipped the rest of the article, thinking, “What sort of halfway competent cognitive scientist actually proposes that we represent the world using first-order symbolic logic? Where’s the statistical content?”
Hopefully I’m not being too harsh there, but I think we know enough about learning in the abstract and its relation to actually-existing human cognition to ditch purely formal theories in favor of expecting that any good theory of cognition should be able to show statistical behavior.
Error