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7 results

Human Reasoning

Human Reasoning
  • David E Over, Jonathan St B T Evans
  • Published online:
    20 May 2024
    Print publication:
    20 June 2024
  • This Element is on new developments in the psychology of reasoning that raise or address philosophical questions. In traditional studies in the psychology of reasoning, the focus was on inference from arbitrary assumptions and not at all from beliefs, and classical binary logic was presupposed as the only standard for human reasoning. But recently a new Bayesian paradigm has emerged in the discipline. This views ordinary human reasoning as mostly inferring probabilistic conclusions from degrees of beliefs, or from hypothetical premises relevant to a purpose at hand, and as often about revising or updating degrees of belief. This Element also covers new formulations of dual-process theories of the mind, stating that there are two types of mental processing, one rapid and intuitive and shared with other animals, and the other slow and reflective and more characteristic of human beings. The final topic covered is the new developments and rationality.

  • 22 - Reasoning, Decision Making, and Rationality

  • Edited by Jonathan E. Adler, Brooklyn College, City University of New York, Lance J. Rips, Northwestern University, Illinois
  • Book:
    Reasoning
    Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    05 May 2008, pp 437-450

  • Summary

    Introduction

    The psychological fields of reasoning and of decision making are reported in different literatures, mostly by different authors and with little cross-reference. Is this just a matter of research traditions, or are the cognitive processes involved fundamentally different? On the face of it, a reasoning task is significantly different from a decision task. In the study of deductive reasoning, for example, subjects may be presented with the premises of some argument and asked whether or not a conclusion follows. For example, a subject may be asked to evaluate a syllogism such as

    1. No A are B

    2. Some B are not C

    3. Therefore, some C are not A

    and to indicate whether or not the conclusion follows. This is presumed to involve a process of reasoning from the premises which may or may not support the conclusion. If the subject has deductive competence – discussed below – it should be possible for him or her to solve the problem set without further information. In this sense, deductive reasoning tasks can be viewed as a special case of well-defined problem-solving tasks, whose main purpose is to investigate people's ability to understand and apply logical principles.

    Decision-making tasks, on the other hand, involve choices between actions and normally involve commitment to particular acts at one point in time, whose consequences will only later be apparent. A simple example might be deciding whether or not to place a bet on a horse.

  • The logic of natural sampling

  • David E. Over
  • Journal:
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 30 / Issue 3 / June 2007
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    29 October 2007, p. 277

  • Barbey & Sloman (B&S) relegate the logical rule of the excluded middle to a footnote. But this logical rule is necessary for natural sampling. Making the rule explicit in a logical tree can make a problem easier to solve. Examples are given of uses of the rule that are non-constructive and not reducible to a domain-specific module.

  • The role of language in the dual process theory of thinking

  • Jonathan St. B. T. Evans, David E. Over
  • Journal:
    Behavioral and Brain Sciences / Volume 25 / Issue 6 / December 2002
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    11 August 2003, pp. 684-685

  • Carruthers’proposals would seem to implicate language in what is known as System 2 thinking (explicit) rather than System 1 thinking (implicit) in contemporary dual process theories of thinking and reasoning. We provide outline description of these theories and show that while Carruthers’characterization of non-verbal processes as domain-specific identifies one critical feature of System 1 thinking, he appears to overlook the fact that much cognition of this type results from domain-general learning processes. We also review cognitive psychological evidence that shows that language and the explicit representations it supports are heavily involved in supporting System 1 thinking, but falls short of supporting his claim that it is the medium in which domain-general thinking occurs.

  • Logic and Decision Making

  • Edited by S. Barry Cooper, University of Leeds, John K. Truss, University of Leeds
  • Book:
    Models and Computability
    Published online:
    17 May 2010
    Print publication:
    17 June 1999, pp 313-338

  • Summary

    Abstract

    There are largely separate psychological literatures on logical reasoning and on decision making. This division has limited psychological theories in both areas, and particularly held up the study of ordinary deductive reasoning. People do not ordinarily reason from a restricted set of arbitrary assumptions taken, in effect, to be certainly true. Much more often, they try to perform inferences from all their relevant beliefs, holding few of these with absolute confidence, or they perform inferences from statements made to them, and treat few of these as absolutely reliable. They recognise that their premises have some degree of probability or uncertainty, and they consequently have more or less confidence in them. This affects their confidence in, and probability judgements about, their conclusions. People also face the problem of getting evidence to assess how probable or uncertain their premises are, and this calls for further probability judgements, as well as utility judgements and decision making. Much better understanding of people's deductive reasoning in realistic contexts will be achieved by integrating research on it with research on decision making and probability and utility judgments.

    Introduction

    There has been extensive psychological research on people's ability at deductive reasoning (Evans, Newstead, Byrne, 1993), but this field has been largely separate from psychological research on human probability judgements and decision making (Baron, 1994). There have been some attempts recently to integrate these fields (Evans and Over, 1996a), but the division between them has limited psychological theories in both, and has been especially harmful to the study of ordinary logical reasoning.