Do our logical skills decline over time?

The Barner article mentions that children are able to consider subtle, intentional cues from a speaker, like eye gaze and body language, but they fail to logically extend language in order to process simple inferences like the difference between some and all as the best descriptors of an event. I’m considering the idea that this disconnect may be evolutionarily advantageous. Language is a fairly new invention, but cues and situational awareness have always been useful to mammals, and I guess it makes sense that we would pick up cues from body language of relevant people before we have advanced processing of logical operators.

I found the suggestion in the Barner article that hierarchies children learn in a rote way are applied faster than ones that must be learned from context interesting, (for example, 3 horses jumped over the log rather than all horses jumped over the log). Is this an argument for presenting all important hierarchical relationships to children in a rote way so they learn them faster? I’ve always been a believer that experiential learning is the best. And how do we decide what kind of knowledge, like ABCs and 123’s are the most important ones to have quick lexical reference to, when logical operations like some, or, and all could be just as important?

What’s interesting too is that adults’ tendency for sophisticated context understanding is a step away from logic. With purely deductive reasoning, we would assume that “Henry ate some of the cake” left a possibility that Henry ate all of the cake, and we should not be explicitly surprised if this were the case. As adults well-versed in the English language, we know it is not the best descriptor of the event to say Henry ate some of the cake when Henry in fact at all of the cake. However, “some” is a logically correct descriptor. I think of language as a logical system, but examples like these force me to consider the ways in which humans as irrational creatures use it for so much more. I guess this shows that humans fine-tune our skills of inductive reasoning as a way to probabilistically, exponentially update our context on the world and we devalue strict logical correctness as a tradeoff to that shortcut to knowledge that inductive reasoning and arbitrary context building allow. Furthermore, if languagewere purely logical, would creative writing have the impact compared to dry, succinct prose that is does?

Clearly, “some” must take on more meaning in our vernacular speech than it does purely as a logical operator.

Does the study of pragmatics have to be mutually exclusive with a theory of the way humans should best communicate through logic?

In light of the most recent presidential election result, I’m thinking a lot about how ideas like this look outside of the ivory tower. Can pragmatics help us better understand each other? Humans aren’t always rational, and I hope studying pragmatics can help me learn about one way in which we are not.