Psychology of reasoning
Encyclopedia
The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason
, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. It is at the intersection of psychology
, philosophy
, linguistics
, cognitive science
, artificial intelligence
, logic
, and probability theory
.
? Current research in this area addresses various questions about reasoning, rationality, intelligence, relationships between emotion and reasoning, and development.
s, e.g., If A then B . Participants in experiments make the modus ponens
inference, given the indicative conditional
If A then B, and given the premise A, they conclude B. But given the indicative conditional and the minor premise for the modus tollens
inference, not-B, about half of the participants in experiments conclude not-A and the remainder conclude that nothing follows..
The ease with which people make conditional inferences is affected by content, as demonstrated in the well-known selection task
developed by Peter Wason. Participants are better able to test a conditional that contains sensible content, e.g., if the envelope is sealed then it must have a 50 cent stamp on it compared to one that contains symbolic content, e.g., if the letter is a vowel then the number is even . Background knowledge can also lead to the suppression of even the simple modus ponens inference Participants given the conditional if Lisa has an essay to write then she studies late in the library and the premise Lisa has an essay to write make the modus ponens
inference 'she studies late in the library', but the inference is suppressed when they are also given a second conditional if it the library stays open then she studies late in the library. Interpretations of the suppression effect are controversial
Other investigations of propositional inference examine how people think about disjunctive alternatives, e.g., A or else B, and how they reason about negation, e.g., It is not the case that A and B. Many experiments have been carried out to examine how people make relational inferences, including comparisons, e.g., A is better than B. Such investigations also concern spatial inferences, e.g. A is in front of B and temporal inferences, e.g. A occurs before B . Other common tasks include categorical syllogisms, used to examine how people reason about quantifiers such as All or Some, e.g., Some of the A are not B..
. Another view is that people rely on domain-specific or content-sensitive rules of inference. A third view is that people rely on mental models, that is, mental representations that correspond to imagined possibilities . A fourth view is that people compute probabilities .
One controversial theoretical issue is the identification of an appropriate competence model, or a standard against which to compare human reasoning. Initially classical logic
was chosen as a competence model. Subsequently some researchers opted for non-monotonic logic
and Bayesian
probability
. Research on mental models and reasoning has led to the suggestion that people are rational in principle but err in practice . Connectionist approaches towards reasoning have also been proposed.
's theory of cognitive development
describes a sequence of stages in the development of reasoning from infancy to adulthood. According to the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development
, changes in reasoning with development come from increasing working memory
capacity, increasing speed of processing, and enhanced executive functions
and control. Increasing self-awareness
is also an important factor.
, deduction
, abduction
, and analogy
?
External links=
Reason
Reason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, ...
, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. It is at the intersection of psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
, philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
, artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
, logic
Logic
In philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, and probability theory
Probability theory
Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with analysis of random phenomena. The central objects of probability theory are random variables, stochastic processes, and events: mathematical abstractions of non-deterministic events or measured quantities that may either be single...
.
Overview
Psychological experiments on how humans and other animals reason have been carried out for over 100 years. An enduring question is whether or not people have the capacity to be rational. What does it mean to be rationalRationality
In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...
? Current research in this area addresses various questions about reasoning, rationality, intelligence, relationships between emotion and reasoning, and development.
Everyday reasoning
How do people reason about sentences in natural language? Most experimentation on deduction has been carried out on hypothetical thought, in particular, examining how people reason about conditionalConditional
Conditional may refer to:*Causal conditional, if X then Y, where X is a cause of Y*Conditional mood , a verb form in many languages*Conditional probability, the probability of an event A given that another event B has occurred...
s, e.g., If A then B . Participants in experiments make the modus ponens
Modus ponens
In classical logic, modus ponendo ponens or implication elimination is a valid, simple argument form. It is related to another valid form of argument, modus tollens. Both Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens can be mistakenly used when proving arguments...
inference, given the indicative conditional
Indicative conditional
In natural languages, an indicative conditional is the logical operation given by statements of the form "If A then B". Unlike the material conditional, an indicative conditional does not have a stipulated definition...
If A then B, and given the premise A, they conclude B. But given the indicative conditional and the minor premise for the modus tollens
Modus tollens
In classical logic, modus tollens has the following argument form:- Formal notation :...
inference, not-B, about half of the participants in experiments conclude not-A and the remainder conclude that nothing follows..
The ease with which people make conditional inferences is affected by content, as demonstrated in the well-known selection task
Wason selection task
Devised in 1966 by Peter Cathcart Wason, the Wason selection task, one of the most famous tasks in the psychology of reasoning, is a logic puzzle which is formally equivalent to the following question:...
developed by Peter Wason. Participants are better able to test a conditional that contains sensible content, e.g., if the envelope is sealed then it must have a 50 cent stamp on it compared to one that contains symbolic content, e.g., if the letter is a vowel then the number is even . Background knowledge can also lead to the suppression of even the simple modus ponens inference Participants given the conditional if Lisa has an essay to write then she studies late in the library and the premise Lisa has an essay to write make the modus ponens
Modus ponens
In classical logic, modus ponendo ponens or implication elimination is a valid, simple argument form. It is related to another valid form of argument, modus tollens. Both Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens can be mistakenly used when proving arguments...
inference 'she studies late in the library', but the inference is suppressed when they are also given a second conditional if it the library stays open then she studies late in the library. Interpretations of the suppression effect are controversial
Other investigations of propositional inference examine how people think about disjunctive alternatives, e.g., A or else B, and how they reason about negation, e.g., It is not the case that A and B. Many experiments have been carried out to examine how people make relational inferences, including comparisons, e.g., A is better than B. Such investigations also concern spatial inferences, e.g. A is in front of B and temporal inferences, e.g. A occurs before B . Other common tasks include categorical syllogisms, used to examine how people reason about quantifiers such as All or Some, e.g., Some of the A are not B..
Theories of reasoning
There are several alternative theories of the cognitive processes that human reasoning is based on . One view is that people rely on a mental logic consisting of formal (abstract or syntactic) inference rules similar to those developed by logicians in the propositional calculusPropositional calculus
In mathematical logic, a propositional calculus or logic is a formal system in which formulas of a formal language may be interpreted as representing propositions. A system of inference rules and axioms allows certain formulas to be derived, called theorems; which may be interpreted as true...
. Another view is that people rely on domain-specific or content-sensitive rules of inference. A third view is that people rely on mental models, that is, mental representations that correspond to imagined possibilities . A fourth view is that people compute probabilities .
One controversial theoretical issue is the identification of an appropriate competence model, or a standard against which to compare human reasoning. Initially classical logic
Classical logic
Classical logic identifies a class of formal logics that have been most intensively studied and most widely used. The class is sometimes called standard logic as well...
was chosen as a competence model. Subsequently some researchers opted for non-monotonic logic
Non-monotonic logic
A non-monotonic logic is a formal logic whose consequence relation is not monotonic. Most studied formal logics have a monotonic consequence relation, meaning that adding a formula to a theory never produces a reduction of its set of consequences. Intuitively, monotonicity indicates that learning a...
and Bayesian
Bayesian probability
Bayesian probability is one of the different interpretations of the concept of probability and belongs to the category of evidential probabilities. The Bayesian interpretation of probability can be seen as an extension of logic that enables reasoning with propositions, whose truth or falsity is...
probability
Probability
Probability is ordinarily used to describe an attitude of mind towards some proposition of whose truth we arenot certain. The proposition of interest is usually of the form "Will a specific event occur?" The attitude of mind is of the form "How certain are we that the event will occur?" The...
. Research on mental models and reasoning has led to the suggestion that people are rational in principle but err in practice . Connectionist approaches towards reasoning have also been proposed.
Development of reasoning
How does reasoning develop? Jean PiagetJean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
's theory of cognitive development
Theory of cognitive development
Piaget's theory of cognitive development is a comprehensive theory about the nature and development of human intelligence first developed by Jean Piaget. It is primarily known as a developmental stage theory, but in fact, it deals with the nature of knowledge itself and how humans come gradually to...
describes a sequence of stages in the development of reasoning from infancy to adulthood. According to the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development
Neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development
Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development has been criticized on many grounds. One criticism is concerned with the very nature of development itself. It is suggested that Piaget's theory does not explain why development from stage to stage occurs. The theory is also criticized for ignoring...
, changes in reasoning with development come from increasing working memory
Working memory
Working memory has been defined as the system which actively holds information in the mind to do verbal and nonverbal tasks such as reasoning and comprehension, and to make it available for further information processing...
capacity, increasing speed of processing, and enhanced executive functions
Executive functions
The executive system is a theorized cognitive system in psychology that controls and manages other cognitive processes. It is responsible for processes that are sometimes referred to as the executive function, executive functions, supervisory attentional system, or cognitive control...
and control. Increasing self-awareness
Self-awareness
Self-awareness is the capacity for introspection and the ability to reconcile oneself as an individual separate from the environment and other individuals...
is also an important factor.
Different sorts of reasoning
Psychologically, what are the relationships between inductionInductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
, deduction
Deductive reasoning
Deductive reasoning, also called deductive logic, is reasoning which constructs or evaluates deductive arguments. Deductive arguments are attempts to show that a conclusion necessarily follows from a set of premises or hypothesis...
, abduction
Abductive reasoning
Abduction is a kind of logical inference described by Charles Sanders Peirce as "guessing". The term refers to the process of arriving at an explanatory hypothesis. Peirce said that to abduce a hypothetical explanation a from an observed surprising circumstance b is to surmise that a may be true...
, and analogy
Analogy
Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...
?
Pragmatics and reasoning
- How do various related factors such as linguistic pragmaticsPragmaticsPragmatics is a subfield of linguistics which studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, and linguistics. It studies how the...
and emotionEmotionEmotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...
relate to the inferences people draw?
Neuroscience of reasoning
- What are the neural correlates of reasoning, often investigated using event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imagingFunctional magnetic resonance imagingFunctional magnetic resonance imaging or functional MRI is a type of specialized MRI scan used to measure the hemodynamic response related to neural activity in the brain or spinal cord of humans or other animals. It is one of the most recently developed forms of neuroimaging...
?
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