ABSTRACT
Wason’s selection task (Wason, 1966, 1968), which requires identification of potential counterexamples to conditionals, has been among the most investigated of laboratory reasoning tasks.1 We believe, however, that much of the literature about this task has relied on mistaken assessments both of the pragmatics of counterexamples to conditionals and of the logical semantics of conditionals, and we address these two topics in this chapter. Our motive is not to present any new theoretical proposals, but to point out how the literature has taken wrong directions and to suggest directions in which the literature should be moving.
