Deductive Reasoning And Strategies

This book brings together both theoretical and empirical research directed toward the role of strategies in deductive reasoning. It offers the first systematic attempt to discuss the role of strategies for deductive reasoning. The empirical chapters correspond well with the main issues in the study of deduction, namely propositional reasoning, spatial reasoning, and syllogistic reasoning. In addition, several chapters present a theoretical analysis of deduction, related to the concept strategy. The book also presents data about the role of strategies for statistical and social reasoning. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of cognitive psychology. It will also be of value to people working in Artificial Intelligence, because it highlights results on how humans use strategies while tackling deductive puzzles.

This bk, which offers one of the 1st systematic attempts to discuss the role of strategies for deductive reasoning & brings together theoretical & empirical research, will be of interest to researchers/advanced students of cognitive psych.

How do people make inferences? How do their reasoning processes differ and why? Methods of Thought attempts to answer these questions by looking in detail at the different reasoning strategies people apply, how these are acquired, how they are selected and how use of these strategies is influenced by individual and task properties. Focusing on empirical data and research into deductive reasoning tasks, this book summarizes current trends in the field and helps us to understand how individual differences in reasoning impact on other studies of higher cognitive abilities in humans. Contributors include researchers who have shown that people make deductions by using a variety of strategies, and others who have found that deductive reasoning problems provide a useful test-bed for investigating general theories of strategy development. Together, it is shown that these general theories derived from other domains have important implications for deductive reasoning, and also that findings by reasoning researchers have wider consequences for general theories of strategy development. This book will be of interest to anyone studying or working in the fields of reasoning, problem solving, and cognitive development, as well as cognitive science in general.

Over the past three decades, there has been a rapid development of research on human thinking and reasoning. This volume provides a comprehensive review of this topic by looking at the important contributions Paolo Legrenzi has made to the field, by bridging the gap from Gestalt ideas to modern cognitive psychology. The contributors, including some of the most distinguished scholars of reasoning and thinking in Europe and the USA, reflect upon the ways in which he has influenced and inspired their own research, and contributed to modern approaches to human inference. This volume draws on both traditional and new topics in reasoning and thinking to provide a wide-ranging survey of human thought. It covers creativity, problem-solving, the linguistic and social aspects of reasoning and judgement, and the social and emotional aspects of decision making through telling examples, such as the cognitive mechanisms underlying consumers' attitudes towards herbal medicines. It considers a series of key questions, such as how do individuals who are unfamiliar with logic reason? And how do they make choices if they are unfamiliar with the probability calculus and decision theory? The discussions are placed throughout within a wider research context and the contributors consider the implications of their research for the field as a whole, making the volume an essential reference for anyone investigating the processes that underlies our thinking, reasoning, and decision-making in everyday life.

Reasoning to the mind is like breathing to the lungs. We are constantly doing it, but rarely take notice. If it fails, however, we are paralyzed. Imagine being unable to infer conclusions from a conversation or being unable to reach a solution to an important life problem. This book focuses on how people draw conclusions from information and discusses the roles that the brain, our memory, and our knowledge play in drawing conclusions in everyday life.

This volume features the complete text of the material presented at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. As in previous years, the symposium included an interesting mixture of papers on many topics from researchers with diverse backgrounds and different goals, presenting a multifaceted view of cognitive science. This volume includes all papers, posters, and summaries of symposia presented at the leading conference that brings cognitive scientists together. The theme of this year's conference was the social, cultural, and contextual elements of cognition, including topics on collaboration, cultural learning, distributed cognition, and interaction.

Deductive reasoning is widely regarded as an activity central to human intelligence, and as such has attracted an increasing amount of psychological study in recent years. In this first major survey of the field for over a decade, the authors provide a detailed and balanced review of all the main kinds of deductive reasoning task studied by psychologists. Topics covered include conditional and disjunctive reasoning, the Wason selection task, relational inference and reasoning with syllogisms and quantifiers. Throughout the review, a careful distinction is drawn between the main empirical findings in the field and the major theoretical approaches proposed to account for these findings. Discussion of experimental findings is organized around three central questions: What is the extent and limitation of human competence in deductive reasoning? What factors are responsible for systematic errors and biases on reasoning tasks? How is human reasoning influenced by the content in which logical problems are presented? Four major classes of theory are discussed throughout the book. The long established theory that people have a mental logic comprised of formal rules of inference is contrasted particularly with the recently developed mental model theory of deductive reasoning. Explanations of many phenomena, especially biases, are also considered in terms of heuristic processes. Finally, consideration is given to accounts of content and context effects based upon the use of domain sensitive rules or schemas. The book ends with a discussion of research on deductive reasoning in the context of the current debate about human rationality.

The twenty-eight essays in this Handbook, all by leading experts in the field, provide the most extensive treatment of various epistemological problems, supplemented by a historical account of this field. The entries are self-contained and substantial contributions to topics such as the sources of knowledge and belief, knowledge acquisition, and truth and justification. There are extensive essays on knowledge in specific fields: the sciences, mathematics, the humanities and the social sciences, religion, and language. Special attention is paid to current discussions on evolutionary epistemology, relativism, the relation between epistemology and cognitive science, sociology of knowledge, epistemic logic, knowledge and art, and feminist epistemology. This collection is a must-have for anybody interested in human knowledge, and its fortunes and misfortunes.