Search results for "Psychology of reasoning"

Abductive Reasoning and Linguistic Meaning

2006

Ancient Theories of Reasoning

2013

In this section, the central question is whether we can find ancient discussions concerning what happens in the mind when a conclusion is drawn. Did ancient authors suppose that there is a psychological force that compels us to accept the conclusion when the premises are accepted and the inference is valid? Or, if the inference is not deductively valid but adds to the credibility of the conclusion in another way, e.g., by being inductive, what happens in the mind when such an inference is drawn? In general, psychology of reasoning was not a vital topic in antiquity. Reasoning was typically considered from a logical, not from a psychological point of view. For example, in Stoic sources the n…

The Development of Conditional Reasoning: A Mental Model Account

2002

Abstract Conditional (if-then) reasoning is one of the key components of logical reasoning. Studies examining the way that children and adults make conditional inferences have shown that while there are some clear developmental patterns, there is also a great deal of variation in performance due to factors such as problem content. Such variation is difficult to model without an explicit process model. In the following we propose a variant of mental model theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983) that can explain much of the empirical data. This model suggests that the development of conditional reasoning can be explained, at least partly, by such factors as the capacity of working memory, the range of k…