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Current issues in the psychology of reasoning
Author(s) -
Evans J. St B. T.
Publication year - 1980
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1980.tb01740.x
Subject(s) - psychology , deductive reasoning , psychology of reasoning , analytic reasoning , verbal reasoning , term (time) , scientific reasoning , epistemology , cognitive psychology , social psychology , cognition , mathematics education , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics , neuroscience
Recent studies of deductive reasoning are reviewed with respect to three questions: (i) Do people reason logically? (ii) Is reasoning introspectible? (iii) Is reasoning sequential? It is argued that the evidence of reasoning experiments suggests a negative answer to all three questions. This conclusion is interesting, since the last two questions at least might be answered affirmatively by common sense, and affirmative answers would be more consistent with the assumptions of many psychologists in related fields. The question is raised, however, as to whether experimental studies have good external validity for the measurement of ‘reasoning’ as we would generally understand the term.