ABSTRACT
The traditional view of deductive reasoning holds that people reason syntactically, by applying formal rules of inference. Mental model theory (Johnson-Laird, 1983; Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991) provides a semantic alternative—subjects reason by constructing a mental model of what the premises are about (comprehension), generating conclusions based on that model (description), and searching for alternative models that falsify their putative conclusions (validation). In addition to its intuitive appeal, model theory has accumulated a significant amount of empirical evidence in its favor. Indeed, Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1991) recently showed that model theory can be used to make accurate predictions about human performance on the entire range of standard tasks that have been used to study deductive reasoning in humans.
