Psychology of Reasoning

The present study examined the contribution of six components of reasoning ability (inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, linear reasoning, conditional reasoning, cause-and-effect reasoning and analogical reasoning) to explain the variation in academic achievement of class 10 th students. Through stratified random sampling technique five hundred and ninety eight students solved 35 contextualized different components of reasoning problems standardised by the investigator. The different components of reasoning ability were assessed with help of automatic linear modelling.  The predictive power of various components of reasoning ability for academic achievement was 31.5 %. Out of the six dimensions of reasoning ability, the maximum involvement is of made by deductive reasoning 4.9% followed by cause and effect reasoning 2.6% inductive reasoning 1.6%, linear reasoning 0.5%, conditional reasoning 0.3% and analogical reasoning 0.2% on academic achievement. The results drawn with the h...

In this paper, I defend that logic has a normative status for reasoning. To support my argument, I question whether logic can be limited to a formal calculus that establishes relations among truth-bearers. Instead, I argue that logic encompasses the study of inference in ordinary language. Similarly, I challenge traditional views of reasoning that depict it as a private process of drawing inferences. Instead, I embrace perspectives that view reasoning as a social activity (Dutilh-Novaes, 2021; Godden, 2015; Kalis, 2022; Mackenzie, 1989). From these bases, I explore the concept of the natural normativity of argumentation (Gilbert, 2007; Jackson, 2019). Since argumentative practices inherently possess a normative dimension, logic aims to capture and represent the rules that govern these linguistic exchanges. Logical rules are the tools from which agents can exert normative control over argumentative practices.

A range of formal models of human reasoning have been proposed in a number of fields such as philosophy, logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, cognitive science, etc.: various logics (epistemic logics; non‐monotonic logics), probabilistic systems (most notably, but not exclusively, Bayesian probability theory), belief revision systems, neural networks, among others. Now, it seems reasonable to require that formal models of human reasoning be (minimally) empirically adequate if they are to be viewed as models of the phenomena in question. How are formal models of human reasoning typically put to empirical test? One way to do so is to isolate a number of key principles of the system, and design experiments to gauge the extent to which participants do or do not follow them in reasoning tasks. Another way is to take relevant existing results and check whether a particular formal model predicts these results. The present investigation provides an illustration of t...

Defending this idea is a challenge. The conventional view is that reasoning is inference, the “passage of thought” from premises — propositions the reasoner accepts as true, at least for the sake of argument — to a conclusion. This process is subject to rules or norms, which logicians explain and codify, whose purpose is to license or allow some inferences and disallow some others. The rules are not arbitrary, and reasoning is not a parlour game, because the inferences allowed are ones in which the truth of the premises ensures the truth of the conclusion. Truth is therefore the value or desideratum that reasoning aims to preserve. Reasoning can guide action no less than belief. But the conclusion of an inference is something capable of being believed, as opposed to something capable of being done. Hence, reasoning guides belief directly, whereas it guides action only indirectly, by guiding belief.

Reasoning is at the core of design activity and thinking. Thus, understanding and explaining reasoning in design is fundamental to understand and support design practice. This paper investigates reasoning in design and its relationship to varying foci at the stage of idea generation and subsequent performance of ideas developed. Understanding reasoning in design and its relationship to the performance of ideas generated is important to understand design activity, which can be used to develop tools or methods that can improve the effectiveness of design teams. Protocol analyses were conducted to investigate idea generation sessions of two industry cases. Reasoning was found to appear in sequences of alternating reasoning types where the initiating reasoning type was decisive. The study found that abductive reasoning led to more radical ideas, whereas deductive reasoning led to ideas being for project requirements, but having a higher proportion being rejected as not valuable. The stu...

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Weather forecasting is an application for predicting the condition of the atmosphere for a given location; such predictions are based on scientific resources and measurements i.e. factual information. However, these predictions are still assumptions, or forecasting, and therefore changeable. Hence, weather forecasters use different strategies to control the certainty of these predictions and mitigate the accuracy of their forecasting. In spite of the importance of this genre and the type of language exploited in it, it has not received enough research work attention, particularly from a pragmatic point of view. This has prompted this study to carry out such a kind of research work in an attempt to shed light on the main pragmatic aspects utilized in weather forecasting reports. Precisely, the study attempts to answer the question: what are the pragmatic aspects that characterize weather forecasting reports? In other words, the current study aims at finding out the pragmatic aspects ...

En este comentario, me gustaría presentar la idea de Charles Sanders Pierce de que, en realidad, los razonamientos elementales y básicos son solamente la deducción, la inducción y la abducción, mientras que el razonamiento por analogía es un tipo de razonamiento no elemental ni básico, que puede ser analizado en términos de aquellos tres razonamientos.

Informal reasoning is the basic reasoning frequently used by most people to solve complex daily life problems. Unlike scientific reasoning, informal reasoning includes cognitive and affective processes that the types of reasoning can be intuitive, emotive and rational. This cross sectional study describes the development of students’ informal reasoning at elementary school, junior high school, and senior high school. Moreover, the study also identifies differences between boys and girls reasoning. Participants are 20 elementary school students, 30 junior high school students, and 30 high school students who attend schools managed by the same foundation. Data were collected using five items test on issues found in everyday life. Students’ responses were grouped into intuitive, emotive, or rational reasoning. The results suggest that students’ informal reasoning tend to develop parallel to the school grade. Related to gender, the study finds that girls tend to use rational reasoning w...

Logical reasoning is of great societal importance and, as stressed by the twenty-first century skills framework, also seen as a key aspect for the development of critical thinking. This study aims at exploring secondary school students’ logical reasoning strategies in formal reasoning and everyday reasoning tasks. With task-based interviews among 4 16- and 17-year-old pre-university students, we explored their reasoning strategies and the reasoning difficulties they encounter. In this article, we present results from linear ordering tasks, tasks with invalid syllogisms and a task with implicit reasoning in a newspaper article. The linear ordering tasks and the tasks with invalid syllogisms are presented formally (with symbols) and non-formally in ordinary language (without symbols). In tasks that were familiar to our students, they used rule-based reasoning strategies and provided correct answers although their initial interpretation differed. In tasks that were unfamiliar to our st...

The psychology of verbal reasoning initially compared performance with classical logic. In the last 25 years, a new paradigm has arisen, which focuses on knowledge-rich reasoning for communication and persuasion and is typically modeled using Bayesian probability theory rather than logic. This paradigm provides a new perspective on argumentation, explaining the rational persuasiveness of arguments that are logical fallacies. It also helps explain how and why people stray from logic when given deductive reasoning tasks. What appear to be erroneous responses, when compared against logic, often turn out to be rationally justified when seen in the richer rational framework of the new paradigm. Moreover, the same approach extends naturally to inductive reasoning tasks, in which people extrapolate beyond the data they are given and logic does not readily apply. We outline links between social and individual reasoning and set recent developments in the psychology of reasoning in the wider ...

How people make inferences between disjunctions and conditionals is a current important question that can test mental logic and mental model theories in propositional reasoning. We propose a dual process account that predicts and integrates diverse reasoning strategies in inferences between disjunctions and conditionals. Two experiments revealed that there were obvious individual differences in reasoning strategies, which led to individual differences in reasoning performances. In particular, the syntactic meaning contrast heuristic dominated inferences in general conditions, whereas knowledge modulation heuristics such as contradiction interpretations and prior belief biases dominated inferences in particular conditions. These heuristics trumped the compatibility heuristic and the analytic strategies of mental logic and mental model theories. Competitions among these diverse reasoning strategies led to symmetries and asymmetries between inferences between disjunctions and condition...

General conditionals, if p then q, can be used to make assertions about sets of objects. Previous studies have generally found that people judge the probability of one these conditionals to be the conditional probability of q given p, P( q|p). Two experiments investigated the qualitative relation between the exhaustive possibilities, p & q, p & ¬q, ¬p & q, and ¬p & ¬q, and truth and possibility judgements about general conditionals. In Experiment 1, for truth judgements, people evaluated a general conditional as “true” in sets containing p & q cases but no p & ¬q, and “true” judgements depended only on P( q|p). In Experiment 2, for possibility judgements, people’s responses implied that only p & q cases have to be possible in a set for a general conditional to be true of the set. Our results add to earlier findings against representing a general conditional as the material conditional of extensional logic, and they provide novel disconfirmation of two recent proposals: the modal sem...

In Wason's Selection Task, subjects: (i) process information from the instructions and build a mental representation of the problem, then: (ii) select a course of action to solve the problem, under the constraints imposed by the instructions. We analyze both aspects as part of a constraint satisfaction problem without assuming Wason's 'logical' solution to be the correct one. We show that outcome of step (i) may induce mutually inconsistent constraints, causing subjects to select at step (ii) solutions that violate some of them. Our analysis explains why inconsistent constraints are less likely disrupt non-abstract (or "thematic") versions of the tasks, but unlike Bayesians does not posit di erent mechanisms in abstract and thematic variants. We then assess the logicality of the task, and conclude on cognitive tasks as coordination problems.

Instructions in Wason’s Selection Task underdetermine empirical subjects’ representation of the underlying problem, and its admissible solutions. We model the Selection Task as an (ambiguous) interrogative learning problem, and reasoning to solutions as: (a) selection of a representation of the problem; and: (b) strategic planning from that representation. We argue that recovering Wason’s ‘normative’ selection is possible only if both stages are constrained further than they are by Wason’s formulation. We conclude comparing our model with other explanatory models, w.r.t. to empirical adequacy, and modeling of bounded rationality.

The so-called ‘Adams ’ Thesis ’ is often understood as the claim that the assertibility of an indicative conditional equals the corresponding conditional probability—schematically: (AT) As(A → B) = P(B|A), provided P(A) = 0. The Thesis is taken by many to be a touchstone of any theorizing about indicative con-ditionals. Yet it is unclear exactly what the Thesis is. I suggest some precise statements of it. I then rebut a number of arguments that have been given in its favor. Finally, I offer a new argument against it. I appeal to an old triviality result of mine against ‘Stalnaker’s Thesis ’ that the probability of a conditional equals the corresponding conditional probability. I showed that for all finite-ranged probability functions, there are strictly more distinct values of conditional probabilities than there are distinct values of probabilities of conditionals, so they cannot all be paired up as Stalna-ker’s Thesis promises. Conditional probabilities are too fine-grained to coi...

A recent meta-study shows that the conclusions driven by human reasoners in psychological experiments about syllogistic reasoning are not the conclusions predicted by classical first-order logic. Moreover, current cognitive theories deviate significantly from the empirical data. In the following, three important cognitive approaches are presented and compared to predictions made by a new approach to model human reasoning tasks, viz. the weak completion semantics. Open questions and implications are discussed.

Human answer patterns in psychological reasoning experiments systematically deviate from predictions of classical logic. When interactions between any artificial reasoning system and humans are necessary this difference can be useful in some cases and lead to problems in other cases. Hence, other approaches than classical logic might be better suited to capture human inference processes. Evaluations are rare of how good such other approaches, e.g., non-monotonic logics, can explain psychological findings. In this article we consider the so-called Suppression Task, a core example in cognitive science about human reasoning that demonstrates that some additional information can lead to the suppression of simple inferences like the modus ponens. The psychological findings for this task have often been replicated and demonstrate a key-effect of human inferences. We analyze inferences of selected formal approaches and compare them by their capacity to cover human inference observed in the...

Throughout the years, the question how humans reason with conditionals has been extensively researched by various disciplines due to its importance not only in science, but also our everyday life. A vast amount of cognitive models have been developed in order to get a better insight into how individuals interpret and reason with ‘If’. Todorovikj and Ragni [21] proposed a predictive modeling testing paradigm for probabilistic conditional reasoning models. Instead of evaluating models based on their ability to fit aggregate data, the focus was shifted to the individual by challenging cognitive models to predict a participant’s answer on a scale from 0 to 100. In this work, we continue the challenge of predicting probabilistic endorsements by taking data from Singmann and Klauer [19] who examine the influence of deductive vs. inductive instructions. We evaluate an established probabilistic cognitive model by Oaksford and Chater [11] and a proposed probabilistic approach based on mental...

Iterated conditionals of the form If p, then if q, r are an important topic in philosophical logic. In recent years, psychologists have gained much knowledge about how people understand simple conditionals, but there are virtually no published psychological studies of iterated conditionals. This paper presents experimental evidence from a study comparing the iterated form, If p, then if q, then r with the ‘imported’, non-iterated form, If p and q, then r, using a probability evaluation task and a truth table task, and taking into account qualitative individual differences. This allows us to critically contrast philosophical and psychological approaches that make diverging predictions regarding the interpretation of these forms. The results strongly support the probabilistic Adams conditional, and the ‘new paradigm’ that takes this conditional as a starting point. Running head: THE PROBABILITY OF ITERATED CONDITIONALS 3 The Probability of Iterated Conditionals

Intuition suggests that for a conditional to be evaluated as true, there must be some kind of connection between its component clauses. In this paper, we formulate and test a new psychological theory to account for this intuition. We combined previous semantic and psychological theorizing to propose that the key to the intuition is a relevance-driven, satisficing-bounded inferential connection between antecedent and consequent. To test our theory, we created a novel experimental paradigm in which participants were presented with a soritical series of objects, notably colored patches (Experiments 1 and 4) and spheres (Experiment 2), or both (Experiment 3), and were asked to evaluate related conditionals embodying non-causal inferential connections (such as "If patch number 5 is blue, then so is patch number 4"). All four experiments displayed a unique response pattern, in which (largely determinate) responses were sensitive to parameters determining inference strength, as w...