Position: Logical Soundness is not a Reliable Criterion for Neurosymbolic Fact-Checking with LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Chan, Jason, Gaizauskas, Robert, Zhao, Zhixue
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915957446803456
author Chan, Jason
Gaizauskas, Robert
Zhao, Zhixue
author_facet Chan, Jason
Gaizauskas, Robert
Zhao, Zhixue
contents As large language models (LLMs) are increasing integrated into fact-checking pipelines, formal logic is often proposed as a rigorous means by which to mitigate bias, errors and hallucinations in these models' outputs. For example, some neurosymbolic systems verify claims by using LLMs to translate natural language into logical formulae and then checking whether the proposed claims are logically sound, i.e. whether they can be validly derived from premises that are verified to be true. We argue that such approaches structurally fail to detect misleading claims due to systematic divergences between conclusions that are logically sound and inferences that humans typically make and accept. Drawing on studies in cognitive science and pragmatics, we present a typology of cases in which logically sound conclusions systematically elicit human inferences that are unsupported by the underlying premises. Consequently, we advocate for a complementary approach: leveraging human-like reasoning tendencies of LLMs as a feature rather than a bug, and using these models to validate the outputs of formal components in neurosymbolic systems against potentially misleading conclusions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_04177
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Position: Logical Soundness is not a Reliable Criterion for Neurosymbolic Fact-Checking with LLMs
Chan, Jason
Gaizauskas, Robert
Zhao, Zhixue
Computation and Language
As large language models (LLMs) are increasing integrated into fact-checking pipelines, formal logic is often proposed as a rigorous means by which to mitigate bias, errors and hallucinations in these models' outputs. For example, some neurosymbolic systems verify claims by using LLMs to translate natural language into logical formulae and then checking whether the proposed claims are logically sound, i.e. whether they can be validly derived from premises that are verified to be true. We argue that such approaches structurally fail to detect misleading claims due to systematic divergences between conclusions that are logically sound and inferences that humans typically make and accept. Drawing on studies in cognitive science and pragmatics, we present a typology of cases in which logically sound conclusions systematically elicit human inferences that are unsupported by the underlying premises. Consequently, we advocate for a complementary approach: leveraging human-like reasoning tendencies of LLMs as a feature rather than a bug, and using these models to validate the outputs of formal components in neurosymbolic systems against potentially misleading conclusions.
title Position: Logical Soundness is not a Reliable Criterion for Neurosymbolic Fact-Checking with LLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04177