ABSTRACT
No one has done more for the psychology of reasoning than Jonathan Evans, and so it is a pleasure to have this opportunity of honouring him. He has carried out many studies of conditionals, and he and his colleagues have been flattering enough to criticize my ideas about them on several occasions (e.g., Evans, 1993; Evans, Over, & Handley, 2005; Over, Evans, & Elqayam, 2010). Hence, it seemed like a good idea to return the favour. My original plan was to contradict every one of his claims, so that you would know that on each point one of us was right and one of us was wrong. Alas, that goal was impossible because we agree on too much, and so instead this article defends a theory of conditionals that Ruth Byrne and I based on mental models (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 2002). It aims to set the record straight where Jonathan and Co. may have bent the theory towards their preconceptions, or overlooked some of its principles. And at times, as you will see, the theory does succeed in contradicting Jonathan’s “suppositional” account of conditionals.
