ABSTRACT

It is only fair for us to say that all three of us endorse the notion that evolutionary factors play a crucial role in reasoning, as well as in other cognitive activities. It is also in the interest of the reader to know that we are not unsympathetic to what the editor of this volume has called the extreme domain speci®city hypothesis. That said, we also think it is important to highlight how dif®cult it is to investigate the theoretical arguments of evolutionary accounts using an experimental paradigm, especially in reasoning. In this respect, we are in agreement with at least one aim of the book, the one that points to the extreme interpretational dif®culties encountered when a speci®c evolutionary theory claims to account for a speci®c set of data.