Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
In this chapter, I will discuss two psychological experiments that challenge the view that people have an inbuilt ability to perform abstract logical reasoning. The first of these experiments, the “selection task”, has been widely interpreted as showing that, instead of logic, people use specialised procedures for dealing with problems that occur commonly in their environment. The second, the “suppression task”, has been interpreted as showing that people do not reason using rules of inference, like forward and backward reasoning, but instead construct a model of the problem and inspect the model for interesting properties. I will respond to some of the issues raised by these experiments in this chapter, but deal with them in greater detail in Chapter 16, after presenting the necessary background material.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.