ABSTRACT
Since the “birth” of the modern cognitive approach on 11 September 1956 at a symposium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (according to Bruner, 1983), academic psychology has no longer been governed by the behavioural approach, but has come to be dominated by modern cognitivism. There is, however, a tendency for applied areas of science to lag behind the developments in basic theoretical areas. So although modern cognitivism is a strapping forty-year-old, its application to psychopathology is in many ways still in its infancy and only now are many of the implications of the cognitive approach being examined or understood. In this chapter, we examine one area in which Phil Johnson-Laird has blazed a trail – that of reasoning. We consider some of the insights that Phil and others who have studied normal reasoning processes have offered us, and how these insights might be applied to the problems of depression and schizophrenia.
