The ability to extrapolate essential gist through the analysis and synthesis of information, prediction of potential outcomes, abstraction of ideas, and integration of relationships with world knowledge is critical for higher-order learning. The present study investigated the efficacy of cognitive training to elicit improvements in gist-reasoning and fact recall ability in 556 public middle-school students (grades seven and eight), versus a sample of 357 middle school students who served as a comparison group, to determine if changes in gist-reasoning and fact (...) recall were demonstrated without cognitive training. The results showed that, in general, cognitive training increased gist-reasoning and fact recall abilities in students from families in poverty as well as students from families living above poverty. However, the magnitude of gains in gist-reasoning varied as a function of gender and grade-level. Our primary findings were that seventh and eighth grade girls and eighth grade boys showed significant increases in gist-reasoning after training regardless of socioeconomic status. There were no significant increases in gist-reasoning or fact recall ability for the 357 middle school students who served in the comparison group. We postulate that cognitive training in middle school is efficacious for improving gist-reasoning ability and fact recall in students from all socioeconomic levels. (shrink)

In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion about the prospects of developing a “naturalized epistemology,” though different authors tend to interpret this label in quite different ways.1 One goal of this paper is to sketch three projects that might lay claim to the “naturalized epistemology” label, and to argue that they are not all equally attractive. Indeed, I’ll maintain that the first of the three – the one I’ll attribute to Quine – is simply incoherent. There (...) is no way we could get what we want from an epistemological theory by pursuing the project Quine proposes. The second project on my list is a naturalized version of reliabilism. This project is not fatally flawed in the way that Quine’s is. However, it’s my contention that the sort of theory this project would yield is much less interesting than might at first be thought. (shrink)

Samuels and Stich explore the debate over the extent to which ordinary human reasoning and decision making is rational. One prominent cluster of views, often associated with the heuristics and biases tradition in psychology, maintains that human reasoning is, in important respects, normatively problematic or irrational. Samuels and Stich start by sketching some key experimental findings from this tradition and describe a range of pessimistic claims about the rationality of ordinary people that these and related findings are sometimes taken to (...) support. Such pessimistic interpretations of the experimental findings have not gone unchallenged however: Samuels and Stich outline some of the research on reasoning that has been done by evolutionary psychologists and sketch a cluster of more optimistic theses about ordinary reasoning that such psychologists defend. Although Samuels and Stich think that the most dire pronouncements made by writers in the heuristics and biases tradition are unwarranted, they also maintain that the situation is rather more pessimistic than sometimes suggested by evolutionary psychologists. They conclude by defending this “middle way” and sketch a family of “dual processing” theories of reasoning which, they argue, offer some support for the moderate interpretation they advocate. (shrink)

This study investigated the kinds of knowledge necessary to learn an important troubleshooting strategy, elimination. A total of 50 college-level students searched for the source of failures in simple digital networks. Production system modelling suggested that students using a common but simpler backtracking strategy would learn the more advanced elimination strategy if they applied certain domain-specific knowledge and the general-purpose problem-solving strategy of reductio ad absurdum. In an experiment, students solved network troubleshooting problems after being trained with either the domain-specific (...) knowledge, the reductio ad absurdum strategy, both types of knowledge, or neither. Students needed both the domain-specific and general knowledge identified by the models in order to significantly increase their elimination use. (shrink)

The author designed the Reasoning Analysis Test to provide empirical support for the CRM analysis of informal fallacies. While informal, the results provide presumptive evidence that those committing informal fallacies may tacitly reason as predicted by CRM. Davis has argued persuasively that Gricean theory has not lived up to expectations, In light of his critique, the CRM analyses of Begging the Question and Equivocation are amended. Johnson has provided standards for judging any theory of informal fallacies. It is argued that (...) CRM survives the Standard Critique and sufficiently meets Johnson's other criteria. (shrink)