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  1. Matching versus optimal data selection in the Wason selection task.Hiroshi Yama - 2001 - Thinking and Reasoning 7 (3):295 – 311.
    It has been reported as a robust effect that people are likely to select a matching case in the Wason selection task. For example, they usually select the 5 case, in the Wason selection task with the conditional "if an E, then a not-5". This was explained by the matching bias account that people are likely to regard a matching case as relevant to the truth of the conditional (Evans, 1998). However, because a positive concept usually constructs a smaller set (...)
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  • Linguistic-pragmatic factors in interpreting disjunctions.Ira A. Noveck, Gennaro Chierchia, Florelle Chevaux, Raphaelle Guelminger & Emmanuel Sylvestre - 2002 - Thinking and Reasoning 8 (4):297 – 326.
    The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Although researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either (a) remaining so, or (b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature ( but not both ). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations and (...)
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  • Probabilistic effects in data selection.Mike Oaksford, Nick Chater & Becki Grainger - 1999 - Thinking and Reasoning 5 (3):193 – 243.
    Four experiments investigated the effects of probability manipulations on the indicative four card selection task (Wason, 1966, 1968). All looked at the effects of high and low probability antecedents (p) and consequents (q) on participants' data selections when determining the truth or falsity of a conditional rule, if p then q . Experiments 1 and 2 also manipulated believability. In Experiment 1, 128 participants performed the task using rules with varied contents pretested for probability of occurrence. Probabilistic effects were observed (...)
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  • Reason and rationality.Richard Samuels, Stephen Stich & Luc Faucher - 2004 - In Ilkka Niiniluoto, Matti Sintonen & Jan Woleński (eds.), Handbook of Epistemology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. pp. 1-50.
    Over the past few decades, reasoning and rationality have been the focus of enormous interdisciplinary attention, attracting interest from philosophers, psychologists, economists, statisticians and anthropologists, among others. The widespread interest in the topic reflects the central status of reasoning in human affairs. But it also suggests that there are many different though related projects and tasks which need to be addressed if we are to attain a comprehensive understanding of reasoning.
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  • The content and acquisition of lexical concepts.Richard Horsey - 2006
    This thesis aims to develop a psychologically plausible account of concepts by integrating key insights from philosophy (on the metaphysical basis for concept possession) and psychology (on the mechanisms underlying concept acquisition). I adopt an approach known as informational atomism, developed by Jerry Fodor. Informational atomism is the conjunction of two theses: (i) informational semantics, according to which conceptual content is constituted exhaustively by nomological mind–world relations; and (ii) conceptual atomism, according to which (lexical) concepts have no internal structure. I (...)
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  • Are explicit performatives assertions?Mark Jary - 2007 - Linguistics and Philosophy 30 (2):207 - 234.
    This paper contributes to the study of explicit performative utterances in the following ways. First, it presents arguments that support Austin’s view that these utterances are not assertions. In doing so, it offers an original explanation of why they cannot be true or false. Second, it puts forward a new analysis of explicit performatives as cases of showing performing, rather than of instances of asserting or declaring that one is performing a particular act. Finally, it develops a new account of (...)
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  • The rational analysis of mind and behavior.Nick Chater & Mike Oaksford - 2000 - Synthese 122 (1-2):93-131.
    Rational analysis (Anderson 1990, 1991a) is an empiricalprogram of attempting to explain why the cognitive system isadaptive, with respect to its goals and the structure of itsenvironment. We argue that rational analysis has two importantimplications for philosophical debate concerning rationality. First,rational analysis provides a model for the relationship betweenformal principles of rationality (such as probability or decisiontheory) and everyday rationality, in the sense of successfulthought and action in daily life. Second, applying the program ofrational analysis to research on human reasoning (...)
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  • The grain of domains: The evolutionary-psychological case against domain-general cognition.Anthony P. Atkinson & Michael Wheeler - 2004 - Mind and Language 19 (2):147-76.
    Prominent evolutionary psychologists have argued that our innate psychological endowment consists of numerous domainspecific cognitive resources, rather than a few domaingeneral ones. In the light of some conceptual clarification, we examine the central inprinciple arguments that evolutionary psychologists mount against domaingeneral cognition. We conclude (a) that the fundamental logic of Darwinism, as advanced within evolutionary psychology, does not entail that the innate mind consists exclusively, or even massively, of domainspecific features, and (b) that a mixed innate cognitive economy of domainspecific (...)
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  • Evolutionary psychology: The emperor's new paradigm.David J. Buller - 2005 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 9 (6):277-283.
    For some evolutionary psychology is merely a field of inquiry, but for others it is a robust paradigm involving specific theories about the nature and evolution of the human mind. Proponents of this paradigm claim to have made several important discoveries regarding the evolved architecture of the mind. Highly publicized discoveries include a cheater-detection module, a psychological sex difference in jealousy, and motivational mechanisms underlying parental love and its lapses, which purportedly result in child maltreatment. In this article, I argue (...)
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  • Context-sensitive inference, modularity, and the assumption of formal processing.Mitch Parsell - 2005 - Philosophical Psychology 18 (1):45-58.
    Performance on the Wason selection task varies with content. This has been taken to demonstrate that there are different cognitive modules for dealing with different conceptual domains. This implication is only legitimate if our underlying cognitive architecture is formal. A non-formal system can explain content-sensitive inference without appeal to independent inferential modules.
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  • Being ostensive (reply to commentaries on “Expression unleashed”).Christophe Heintz & Thom Scott-Phillips - 2023 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 46:e20.
    One of our main goals with “Expression unleashed” was to highlight the distinctive, ostensive nature of human communication, and the many roles that ostension can play in human behavior and society. The commentaries we received forced us to be more precise about several aspects of this thesis. At the same time, no commentary challenged the central idea that the manifest diversity of human expression is underpinned by a common cognitive unity. Our reply is organized around six issues: (1) languages and (...)
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  • Typographical iconicity and the communication of impressions: A relevance-theoretic perspective.Daniel William Pinder - 2022 - Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 18 (1):1-27.
    This article studies the cognitive and communicative effects of typographical iconicity in poetry from the perspective of relevance theory. It argues that the visual aspect pertaining to an instance of typographical iconicity conveys a sensory impression, which perceptually resembles elements of the semantic material represented via the typographical iconicity’s lexical aspect. It is suggested that the non-propositional information relating to this impression can trigger the derivation of a wide array of weak implicatures which can combine to form an impressionistic and (...)
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  • Massive modularity : an ontological hypothesis or an adaptationist discovery heuristic?Joseph David de Jesús Villena Saldaña - 2021 - Dissertation, Lingnan University
    Cognitive modules are internal mental structures. Some theorists and empirical researchers hypothesize that the human mind is either partially or massively comprised of structures that are modular in nature. Modules are also invoked to explain cognitive capacities associated with the performance of specific functional tasks. Jerry Fodor (1983) considered that modules are useful only for explaining relatively low-level systems (input systems). These are the systems involved in capacities like perception and language. For Fodor, the central (high-level) systems of mind — (...)
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  • Logical Form and the Limits of Thought.Manish Oza - 2020 - Dissertation, University of Toronto
    What is the relation of logic to thinking? My dissertation offers a new argument for the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking in the following sense: representational activity counts as thinking only if it manifests sensitivity to logical rules. In short, thinking has to be minimally logical. An account of thinking has to allow for our freedom to question or revise our commitments – even seemingly obvious conceptual connections – without loss of understanding. This freedom, I argue, requires that (...)
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  • Pragmatics in the False-Belief Task: Let the Robot Ask the Question!Jean Baratgin, Marion Dubois-Sage, Baptiste Jacquet, Jean-Louis Stilgenbauer & Frank Jamet - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:593807.
    The poor performances of typically developing children younger than 4 in the first-order false-belief task “Maxi and the chocolate” is analyzed from the perspective of conversational pragmatics. An ambiguous question asked by an adult experimenter (perceived as a teacher) can receive different interpretations based on a search for relevance, by which children according to their age attribute different intentions to the questioner, within the limits of their own meta-cognitive knowledge. The adult experimenter tells the child the following story of object-transfer: (...)
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  • The value of thinking and the normativity of logic.Manish Oza - 2020 - Philosophers' Imprint 20 (25):1-23.
    (1) This paper is about how to build an account of the normativity of logic around the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking. I take the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking to mean that representational activity must tend to conform to logic to count as thinking. (2) I develop a natural line of thought about how to develop the constitutive position into an account of logical normativity by drawing on constitutivism in metaethics. (3) I argue that, while (...)
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  • The Epistemic Role of Core Cognition.Zoe Jenkin - 2020 - Philosophical Review 129 (2):251-298.
    According to a traditional picture, perception and belief have starkly different epistemic roles. Beliefs have epistemic statuses as justified or unjustified, depending on how they are formed and maintained. In contrast, perceptions are “unjustified justifiers.” Core cognition is a set of mental systems that stand at the border of perception and belief, and has been extensively studied in developmental psychology. Core cognition's borderline states do not fit neatly into the traditional epistemic picture. What is the epistemic role of these states? (...)
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  • Conditionals, Context, and the Suppression Effect.Fabrizio Cariani & Lance J. Rips - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (3):540-589.
    Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B. Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional (...)
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  • Relevance and Reason Relations.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen, Henrik Singmann & Karl Christoph Klauer - 2017 - Cognitive Science 41 (S5):1202-1215.
    This paper examines precursors and consequents of perceived relevance of a proposition A for a proposition C. In Experiment 1, we test Spohn's assumption that ∆P = P − P is a good predictor of ratings of perceived relevance and reason relations, and we examine whether it is a better predictor than the difference measure − P). In Experiment 2, we examine the effects of relevance on probabilistic coherence in Cruz, Baratgin, Oaksford, and Over's uncertain “and-to-if” inferences. The results suggest (...)
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  • Human reasoning and cognitive science.Keith Stenning & Michiel van Lambalgen - 2008 - Boston, USA: MIT Press.
    In the late summer of 1998, the authors, a cognitive scientist and a logician, started talking about the relevance of modern mathematical logic to the study of human reasoning, and we have been talking ever since. This book is an interim report of that conversation. It argues that results such as those on the Wason selection task, purportedly showing the irrelevance of formal logic to actual human reasoning, have been widely misinterpreted, mainly because the picture of logic current in psychology (...)
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  • Vittorio Girotto.Paolo Legrenzi & Phil Johnson-Laird - 2017 - Thinking and Reasoning 23 (1):1-9.
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  • Persuasion and Pragmatics: An Empirical Test of the Guru Effect Model.Jordan S. Martin, Amy Summerville & Virginia B. Wickline - 2017 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 8 (2):219-234.
    Decades of research have investigated the complex role of source credibility in attitude persuasion. Current theories of persuasion predict that when messages are thoughtfully scrutinized, argument strength will tend to have a greater effect on attitudes than source credibility. Source credibility can affect highly elaborated attitudes, however, when individuals evaluate material that elicits low attitude extremity. A recently proposed model called the guru effect predicts that source credibility can also cause attitudinal change by biasing the interpretation of pragmatically ambiguous material. (...)
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  • Reasoning the fast and frugal way: Models of bounded rationality.Gerd Gigerenzer & Daniel Goldstein - 1996 - Psychological Review 103 (4):650-669.
    Humans and animals make inferences about the world under limited time and knowledge. In contrast, many models of rational inference treat the mind as a Laplacean Demon, equipped with unlimited time, knowledge, and computational might. Following H. Simon's notion of satisficing, the authors have proposed a family of algorithms based on a simple psychological mechanism: one-reason decision making. These fast and frugal algorithms violate fundamental tenets of classical rationality: They neither look up nor integrate all information. By computer simulation, the (...)
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  • Ranking Theory and Conditional Reasoning.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen - 2016 - Cognitive Science 40 (4):848-880.
    Ranking theory is a formal epistemology that has been developed in over 600 pages in Spohn's recent book The Laws of Belief, which aims to provide a normative account of the dynamics of beliefs that presents an alternative to current probabilistic approaches. It has long been received in the AI community, but it has not yet found application in experimental psychology. The purpose of this paper is to derive clear, quantitative predictions by exploiting a parallel between ranking theory and a (...)
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  • Leslie on Generics.Rachel Katharine Sterken - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (9):2493-2512.
    This paper offers three objections to Leslie’s recent and already influential theory of generics :375–403, 2007a, Philos Rev 117:1–47, 2008): her proposed metaphysical truth-conditions are subject to systematic counter-examples, the proposed disquotational semantics fails, and there is evidence that generics do not express cognitively primitive generalisations.
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  • The influence of responsibility and guilt on naive hypothesis-testing.Francesco Mancini & Amelia Gangemi - 2004 - Thinking and Reasoning 10 (3):289-320.
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  • Explicatures are NOT Cancellable.Alessandro Capone - 2013 - In Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics. Cham: Springer. pp. 131-151.
    Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.
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  • Distinguishing the reflective, algorithmic, and autonomous minds: Is it time for a tri-process theory.Keith E. Stanovich - 2009 - In Jonathan St B. T. Evans & Keith Frankish (eds.), In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond. Oxford University Press. pp. 55--88.
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  • Solving probabilistic and statistical problems: a matter of information structure and question form.Vittorio Girotto & Michel Gonzalez - 2001 - Cognition 78 (3):247-276.
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  • Deontic Reasoning With Emotional Content: Evolutionary Psychology or Decision Theory?Nick Perham & Mike Oaksford - 2005 - Cognitive Science 29 (5):681-718.
    Three experiments investigated the contrasting predictions of the evolutionary and decision-theoretic approaches to deontic reasoning. Two experiments embedded a hazard management (HM) rule in a social contract scenario that should lead to competition between innate modules. A 3rd experiment used a pure HM task. Threatening material was also introduced into the antecedent, p, of a deontic rule, if p then must q. According to the evolutionary approach, more HM responses (Cosmides & Tooby, 2000) are predicted when p is threatening, whereas (...)
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  • Looking for Arguments.Hugo Mercier - 2012 - Argumentation 26 (3):305-324.
    Abstract How do people find arguments while engaged in a discussion? Following an analogy with visual search, a mechanism that performs this task is described. It is a metarepresentational device that examines representations in a mostly serial manner until it finds a good enough argument supporting one’s position. It is argued that the mechanism described in dual process theories as ‘system 2’, or analytic reasoning fulfills these requirements. This provides support for the hypothesis that reasoning serves an argumentative function. Content (...)
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  • Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory.Dan Sperber - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (2):57.
    Short abstract (98 words). Reasoning is generally seen as a means to improve knowledge and make better decisions. However, much evidence shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests that the function of reasoning should be rethought. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given humans’ exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of (...)
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  • The “vanishing” of the disjunction effect by sensible procrastination.Maria Bagassi & Laura Macchi - 2007 - Mind and Society 6 (1):41-52.
    The disjunction effect (Tversky and Shafir in Psychol Sci 3:305–309, 1992) occurs when decision makers prefer option x (versus y) when knowing that event A occurs and also when knowing that event A does not occur, but they refuse x (or prefer y) when not knowing whether or not A occurs. This form of incoherence violates Savage’s (Cognition 57:31–95, 1954) sure-thing principle, one of the basic axioms of the rational theory of decision-making. The phenomenon was attributed to a lack of (...)
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  • Time is of the essence: Explanatory pluralism and accommodating theories about long-term processes.Robert N. McCauley - 2009 - Philosophical Psychology 22 (5):611-635.
    Unified, all-purpose, philosophical models of reduction in science lack resources for capturing varieties of cross-scientific relations that have proven critical to understanding some scientific achievements. Not only do those models obscure the distinction between successional and cross-scientific relations, their preoccupations with the structures of both theories and things provide no means for accommodating the contributions to various sciences of theories and research about long-term diachronic processes involving large-scale, distributed systems. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the parade case. (...)
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  • Use or misuse of the selection task? Rejoinder to Fiddick, Cosmides, and Tooby.Dan Sperber - 2002 - Cognition 85 (3):277-290.
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  • Discussion de-focusing on the Wason selection task: Mental models or mental inference rules? A commentary on green and larking (1995).David K. Hardman - 1998 - Thinking and Reasoning 4 (1):83 – 94.
    Mental models theorists have proposed that reasoners tend to focus on what is explicit in their mental models, and that certain debiasing procedures can induce them to direct their attention to other relevant information. For instance, Green and Larking 1995; also Green, 1995a facilitated performance on the Wason selection task by inducing participants to consider counterexamples to the conditional rule. However, these authors acknowledged that one aspect of their data might require some modification to the mental models theory. This research (...)
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  • Collaborative reasoning: Evidence for collective rationality.David Moshman Molly Geil - 1998 - Thinking and Reasoning 4 (3):231 – 248.
    Reasoning may be defined as a deliberate effort to coordinate inferences so as to reach justifiable conclusions. Thus defined, reasoning includes collaborative as well as individual forms of cognitive action. The purpose of the present study was to demonstrate a circumstance in which collaborative reasoning is qualitatively superior to individual reasoning. The selection task, a well known logical hypothesis-testing problem, was presented to 143 college undergraduates-32 individuals and 20 groups of 5 or 6 interacting peers. The correct (falsification) response pattern (...)
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  • Rationality disputes – psychology and epistemology.Patrick Rysiew - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (6):1153-1176.
    This paper reviews the largely psychological literature surrounding apparent failures of human rationality (sometimes referred to as 'the Rationality Wars') and locates it with respect to concepts and issues within more traditional epistemological inquiry. The goal is to bridge the gap between these two large and typically disconnected literatures – concerning rationality and the psychology of human reasoning, on the one hand, and epistemological theories of justified or rational belief, on the other – and to do so in such as (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Relevance theory.Deirdre Wilson & Dan Sperber - 2002 - In Deirdre Wilson & Dan Sperber (eds.), Relevance theory. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 607-632.
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  • The probability of conditionals: The psychological evidence.David E. Over & Jonathan St B. T. Evans - 2003 - Mind and Language 18 (4):340–358.
    The two main psychological theories of the ordinary conditional were designed to account for inferences made from assumptions, but few premises in everyday life can be simply assumed true. Useful premises usually have a probability that is less than certainty. But what is the probability of the ordinary conditional and how is it determined? We argue that people use a two stage Ramsey test that we specify to make probability judgements about indicative conditionals in natural language, and we describe experiments (...)
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  • Conditionals: A theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference.Philip Johnson-Laird & Ruth M. J. Byrne - 2002 - Psychological Review 109 (4):646-678.
    The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C. The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. Knowledge, pragmatics, and semantics can modulate these meanings. Modulation can add information about temporal and other relations between antecedent and consequent. It can also prevent the construction of possibilities to yield 10 distinct sets of possibilities to which conditionals can refer. The mental representation of a (...)
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  • Semantics as a foundation for psychology: A case study of Wason's selection task. [REVIEW]Keith Stenning & Michiel van Lambalgen - 2001 - Journal of Logic, Language and Information 10 (3):273-317.
    We review the various explanations that have been offered toaccount for subjects'' behaviour in Wason ''s famous selection task. Weargue that one element that is lacking is a good understanding ofsubjects'' semantics for the key expressions involved, and anunderstanding of how this semantics is affected by the demands the taskputs upon the subject''s cognitive system. We make novel proposals inthese terms for explaining the major content effects of deonticmaterials. Throughout we illustrate with excerpts from tutorialdialogues which motivate the kinds of (...)
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  • Science, Erudition and Relevant Connections.Pascal Boyer - 2003 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 3 (4):344-358.
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  • Rationality and psychology.Richard Samuels & Stephen Stich - 2004 - In Alfred R. Mele & Piers Rawling (eds.), The Oxford handbook of rationality. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 279-300.
    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 (...)
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  • Adaptationism for human cognition: Strong, spurious, or weak?Scott Atran - 2005 - Mind and Language 20 (1):39-67.
    Strong adaptationists explore complex organic design as taskspecific adaptations to ancestral environments. This strategy seems best when there is evidence of homology. Weak adaptationists don't assume that complex organic (including cognitive and linguistic) functioning necessarily or primarily represents taskspecific adaptation. This approach to cognition resembles physicists' attempts to deductively explain the most facts with fewest hypotheses. For certain domainspecific competencies (folkbiology) strong adaptationism is useful but not necessary to research. With grouplevel belief systems (religion) strong adaptationism degenerates into spurious notions (...)
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  • Putting Inferentialism and the Suppositional Theory of Conditionals to the Test.Niels Skovgaard-Olsen - 2017 - Dissertation, University of Freiburg
    This dissertation is devoted to empirically contrasting the Suppositional Theory of conditionals, which holds that indicative conditionals serve the purpose of engaging in hypothetical thought, and Inferentialism, which holds that indicative conditionals express reason relations. Throughout a series of experiments, probabilistic and truth-conditional variants of Inferentialism are investigated using new stimulus materials, which manipulate previously overlooked relevance conditions. These studies are some of the first published studies to directly investigate the central claims of Inferentialism empirically. In contrast, the Suppositional Theory (...)
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  • Decision science: from Ramsey to dual process theories.Nils-Eric Sahlin, Annika Wallin & Johannes Persson - 2010 - Synthese 172 (1):129-143.
    The hypothesis that human reasoning and decision-making can be roughly modeled by Expected Utility Theory has been at the core of decision science. Accumulating evidence has led researchers to modify the hypothesis. One of the latest additions to the field is Dual Process theory, which attempts to explain variance between participants and tasks when it comes to deviations from Expected Utility Theory. It is argued that Dual Process theories at this point cannot replace previous theories, since they, among other things, (...)
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  • Weird people, yes, but also weird experiments.Nicolas Baumard & Dan Sperber - 2010 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2-3):84-85.
    Henrich et al.’s article fleshes out in a very useful and timely manner comments often heard but rarely published about the extraordinary cultural imbalance in the recruitment of participants in psychology experiments and the doubt this casts on generalization of findings from these “weird” samples to humans in general. The authors mention that one of the concerns they have met in defending their views has been of a methodological nature: “the observed variation across populations may be due to various methodological (...)
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  • The probabilistic approach to human reasoning.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2001 - Trends in Cognitive Sciences 5 (8):349-357.
    A recent development in the cognitive science of reasoning has been the emergence of a probabilistic approach to the behaviour observed on ostensibly logical tasks. According to this approach the errors and biases documented on these tasks occur because people import their everyday uncertain reasoning strategies into the laboratory. Consequently participants' apparently irrational behaviour is the result of comparing it with an inappropriate logical standard. In this article, we contrast the probabilistic approach with other approaches to explaining rationality, and then (...)
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  • Precis of the rational imagination: How people create alternatives to reality.Ruth Mj Byrne - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (5):439-452.
    The human imagination remains one of the last uncharted terrains of the mind. People often imagine how events might have turned out something had been different. The of reality, those aspects more readily changed, indicate that counterfactual thoughts are guided by the same principles as rational thoughts. In the past, rationality and imagination have been viewed as opposites. But research has shown that rational thought is more imaginative than cognitive scientists had supposed. In The Rational Imagination, I argue that imaginative (...)
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