ABSTRACT

Psychology.—Right from the beginning of cognitivism, the brain was treated as a deductive machine whose constituents (neurons) embody logical principles (→COGNITIVISM, LOGIC). This view led to the idea of the “logical mind” (→MIND), and the brain was metaphorically likened to the inference system of a computer. In the psychology of reasoning, inference-making processes, the foundation of deduction, have been widely studied within this framework. But have the studies demonstrated the deductive competence of the logical mind? Apparently not. While certain inference schemas are well mastered by all subjects, others have been shown to trigger frequent errors. This finding has raised the question of the rationality of human subjects: Is there a mental logic, and if so, how can we explain reasoning errors? This, essentially, is the core of the cognitivist debate, with one side arguing for the theory of mental logic and the other for approaches revolving around mental models, pragmatic schemas, and reasoning biases.