ABSTRACT
Reasoning is fundamental to human intelligence. There are many theories about what people do when confronted with logical reasoning problems and it is by no means apparent that explicit reasoning tasks are solved by an explicit process of reasoning or on the basis of only the information presented. In one sense one can see the psychology of deductive reasoning as being as old as the study of logic, which originated in the writings of Aristotle. Comparatively little further work was conducted on the psychology of deductive reasoning—at least in adult subjects—until the 1960s, when an intensive set of studies was conducted by Peter Wason, together with students and colleagues. The implications of reasoning research for the rationality debate are of interest, and are addressed by several papers in a volume edited by K. I. Manktelow and D. E. Over. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
