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 (...) conditional normally makes explicit only the possibilities in which its antecedent is true, yielding other possibilities implicitly. Reasoners tend to focus on the explicit possibilities. The theory predicts the major phenomena of understanding and reasoning with conditionals. (shrink)

This handbook gives an overview of cognition and emotion research. It provides readers with the historical background and the philosophical arguments on the debate, before moving on to outline the general aspects of various research traditions. Split into comprehensive sections, it discusses cognitive processes, including memory, decision-making, and reasoning, and also emotions such as anger, anxiety, sadness, and jealousy. With contributions from leading researchers in the subject, this volume examines the main theories, and also the application of these to other (...) areas of psychology. (shrink)

Good reasoning can lead to success; bad reasoning can lead to catastrophe. Yet, it's not obvious how we reason, and why we make mistakes. This new book by one of the pioneers of the field, Philip Johnson-Laird, looks at the mental processes that underlie our reasoning. It provides the most accessible account yet of the science of reasoning.

The aim of this article is to strengthen links between cognitive brain research and formal logic. The work covers three fundamental sorts of logical inferences: reasoning in the propositional calculus, i.e. inferences with the conditional “if...then”, reasoning in the predicate calculus, i.e. inferences based on quantifiers such as “all”, “some”, “none”, and reasoning with n-place relations. Studies with brain-damaged patients and neuroimaging experiments indicate that such logical inferences are implemented in overlapping but different bilateral cortical networks, including parts of the (...) fronto-temporal cortex, the posterior parietal cortex, and the visual cortices. I argue that these findings show that we do not use a single deterministic strategy for solving logical reasoning problems. This account resolves many disputes about how humans reason logically and why we sometimes deviate from the norms of formal logic. (shrink)