The new paradigm in the psychology of reasoning draws on Bayesian formal frameworks, and some advocates of the new paradigm think of these formal frameworks as providing a computational-level theory of rational human inference. I argue that Bayesian theories should not be seen as providing a computational-level theory of rational human inference, where by “Bayesian theories” I mean theories that claim that all rational credal states are probabilistically coherent and that rational adjustments of degrees of belief in the light of (...) new evidence must be in accordance with some sort of conditionalization. The problems with the view I am criticizing can best be seen when we look at chains of inferences, rather than single-step inferences. Chains of inferences have been neglected almost entirely within the new paradigm. (shrink)

Knauff and Gazzo Castañeda (this issue) critique the "new paradigm" – a framework that replaces logic with probabilities – on the grounds that there existed no "old” paradigm for it to supplant. Their position is supported by the large numbers of theories that theorists developed to explain the Wason selection task, syllogisms, and other tasks. We propose some measures to inhibit such facile theorizing, which threatens the viability of cognitive science. We show that robust results exist contrary to the new (...) paradigm, and that it is unable to account for other results. (shrink)

We examine schoolchildren’s reasoning with spatial relations, such as ‘is to the left of’. Our aims are to obtain a more precise account of the effect of working memory on reasoning, a more detaile...

We elaborate on the approach to syllogistic reasoning based on “case identification” (Stenning & Oberlander, 1995; Stenning & Yule, 1997). It is shown that this can be viewed as the formalisation of a method of proof that dates back to Aristotle, namely proof by exposition ( ecthesis ), and that there are traces of this method in the strategies described by a number of psychologists, from St rring (1908) to the present day. We hypothesised that by rendering individual cases explicit (...) in the premises, the chance that reasoners would engage in a proof by exposition would be enhanced, and thus performance improved. To do so, we used syllogisms with singular premises (e.g., this X is Y ). This resulted in a uniform increase in performance as compared to performance on the associated standard syllogisms. These results cannot be explained by the main theories of syllogistic reasoning in their current state. (shrink)

How do people imagine the possibilities in which an assertion would be true and the possibilities in which it would be false? We argue that the mental representation of the meanings of connectives, such as "and", "or", and "if", specify how to construct the true possibilities for simple assertions containing just a single connective. It follows that the false possibilities are constructed by inference from the true possibilities. We report converging evidence supporting this account from four experiments in which the (...) participants had to list the true and the false possibilities for various sorts of assertion. Their systematic errors, response times, and think-aloud protocols corroborated the theory's predictions. Not even true possibilities are immediately available for complex assertions containing two or more different connectives. The task of listing the true possibilities then becomes difficult, and the task of listing the false possibilities almost impossible. (shrink)