ABSTRACT
Contemporary psychological theories of human reasoning are recapitulating the historical pattern observed for theories of other cognitive functions. Initial theories described human reasoning as a content-free, domain-general process (Braine, 1978; Rips, 1983). These theories were seriously challenged by mounting evidence of domain-specific content effects in human reasoning performance (e.g., Cox & Griggs, 1982; Griggs & Cox, 1983; Cheng & Holyoak, 1985; Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992; Thompson, 1994). In order to salvage content-free theories, their proponents have attributed content effects to "bias" (Rumain, Connell, & Braine, 1983; Evans, 1989) or content-specific parameters that modify the inputs to the content-free system (Braine & O'Brien, 1991; Rips, 1994). Other theorists have abandoned the notion of a content-free reasoner, proposing instead collections of domain-specific rules that are induced from life experiences with classes of situations (Cheng & Holyoak, 1985 and 1989).
