ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the question of how children develop the ability to make inferences. Because induction was discussed in chapters 4 and 6, the primary focus is on deductive inferences, which are divided into relational and categorical. However, abduction and hypothesis testing are considered because these were not discussed earlier. Relational deductive inferences include transitive inferences and linear ordering problems. These are sometimes called N-term series or linear syllogism problems, but this label does not cover all possibilities, because there are nonlinear problems such as a > b, a > c, therefore a is biggest, that do not form series or linear structures. Transitivity has been used as a reference task throughout this work, but the processes of transitive inference will now be considered in more detail. Categorical deductive inferences include inferences based on category memberships, such as All A are B, all B are C, therefore all A are C.
