What Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy?

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Force logic enhances CBT by addressing non-truth-functional emotional reasoning.

Force logic clarifies non-empirical speech acts in anxiety and depression within CBT.

Force logic integrates truth-functional and modal logic for nuanced emotional reasoning.

Standard treatments of cognitive-behavior therapy (CBT) rely primarily on truth-functional logic to help clients overcome their irrational thinking. Thus, the client learns to avoid overgeneralizations (“My partner is always complaining”) and false hypotheses (“My boss did not say hello to me today so he is intending to fire me”) by paying careful attention to the empirical evidence (“My partner complains more than I prefer but not always”); and alternative explanations (“Maybe my boss was preoccupied with something when he ignored me this morning”).

While the value of the latter is inestimable, this empirical approach does not address locutions that are not truth-functional, that is, neither true nor false. Consider "I must never fail," "Others should always treat me fairly," and "I am a bad person." These locutions are often performed in the context of people’s emotional reasoning, where they support emotions such as depression, anxiety, anger, and guilt. The meaning or purpose of such locutions is........

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