Questions and challenges for the new psychology of reasoning

In common with a number of other authors I believe that there has been a paradigm shift in the psychology of reasoning, specifically the area traditionally labelled as the study of deduction. The deduction paradigm was founded in a philosophical tradition that assumed logicality as the basis for rat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Thinking & reasoning 2012-02, Vol.18 (1), p.5-31
Main Author: Evans, Jonathan St. B. T.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Certainty
Cognition. Intelligence
Decision Making
Deductive reasoning
Dual-process theory
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
New paradigm
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Reasoning. Problem solving
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Summary:In common with a number of other authors I believe that there has been a paradigm shift in the psychology of reasoning, specifically the area traditionally labelled as the study of deduction. The deduction paradigm was founded in a philosophical tradition that assumed logicality as the basis for rational thought, and provided binary propositional logic as the agreed normative framework. By contrast, many contemporary authors assume that people have degrees of uncertainty in both premises and conclusions, and reject binary logic as a workable normative system. I discuss a number of questions and challenges for this new psychology of reasoning, including the following: (a) Do we need an alternative normative system, such as Bayesianism, for the new paradigm? (b) Is there any longer a clear distinction between the study of deductive and inductive reasoning, the latter having its own tradition and literature? (c) Precisely how is the integrated study of reasoning and decision making facilitated by the new paradigm? (d) What difficulties with dual-processing approaches need to be resolved, if they are to take us forward?
ISSN:1354-6783
1464-0708
DOI:10.1080/13546783.2011.637674