ABSTRACT
The last two chapters were concerned with the ‘basics’ of reasoning research in two broad areas, quantified and propositional reasoning. This research was based on a strategy that can strike people as a little peculiar: to strip out meaningful content and use abstract materials (see Evans, 2002, for an extensive discussion of this and related themes). In fact, this strategy has a long and honourable history in psychological science, dating back to Ebbinghaus’s pioneering experiments on memory in the 19th century. His famous nonsense syllables were designed so that memories could be studied from their very beginnings: when you remember real words, you already know something about them, and so it is impossible to state when a memory for those words really begins. In the study of reasoning, the argument is similar. If people are given realistic problems to think about, then some of that thinking may reside in the meanings of the materials, and so a pure measure of thinking is impossible.
