ABSTRACT
The title of the book is “Deductive reasoning and strategies.” As you may have noticed, however, the term deductive reasoning is used very broadly. Theoretically, deductive reasoning has the following characteristics. It is goaldirected reasoning that begins with a definite starting point, that is, a set of premises. Furthermore, deductive inferences have conclusions that follow necessarily from the premises (based on the principles of logic). Consequently, a valid deduction yields a conclusion that must be true given that the premises are true. There are, of course, many other forms of reasoning, such as induction, reasoning by analogy, calculation, creation and so on. Nevertheless, deduction is a very important form of reasoning. It plays a crucial role in many aspects of our daily life and also in many psychological theories (e.g., about perception, text comprehension), or as Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1991) stated:
The chapters in the book correspond nicely to the main issues in the study of deduction, namely prepositional reasoning (chaps. 3-7 and partly chap. 11), spatial reasoning (chaps. 8-10), and syllogistic reasoning (chaps. 11-12). In addition, chapters 1 and 2 present a theoretical analysis of deduction, related to the concept strategy. The book also presents two chapters, that are only loosely related to deduction: Chapter 13 deals with statistical inference, that is, reasoning about the probability of certain outcomes and chapter 14 discusses social reasoning, by offering a new analysis of behavior of participants in the prisoner’s dilemma game. As these chapters convincingly show, however, techniques and ideas used in the study of deduction are indeed useful to understand the other kinds of reasoning. Moreover, these other kinds of reasoning are for a large part based on a deductive component.
