ABSTRACT
The psychology of reasoning, or more accurately a particular community within it, has been undergoing an identity crisis for the past 20 years or so. “Reasoning”, of course, is a broad term which some philosophers use almost as a synonym for cognitive processing. Even within cognitive psychology we have distinct fields focussed upon deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, casual reasoning, counterfactual reasoning and so on. The identity crisis belongs to the first of these communities, the inheritors of the tradition of “deductive” reasoning. This field has its origins in pre-war psychological studies (e.g. Wilkins, 1928; Woodworth and Sells, 1935) but also in a long philosophical tradition of logicist thinking, in the sense of that term which assumes logic to be the foundation for rational human thought (see Henle, 1962). Post-war study was inspired particularly by the work of Peter Wason whose early book with Phil Johnson-Laird helped to define the field (Wason and Johnson-Laird, 1972). As this psychology of reasoning developed clear identity and paradigms, I authored a review some ten years later (Evans, 1982), and then with others, an update in the early 1990s (Evans, Newstead, and Byrne, 1993). But even as the last was published, discontent with the paradigm was developing.
