ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the nature of conditional reasoning and reviews experimental studies which use methods other than the selection task. The topic of conditional reasoning is of equal interest in logic and linguistics. Psychological research on conditional reasoning has been conducted largely within some main paradigms. The chapter looks at some general studies of the influence of content and context on conditional reasoning patterns, and examines some studies that have focused specifically on the suppression of conditional inferences by contextual information. Many authors—especially those in the mental logic tradition of Piaget—have attempted to analyse effects of context and content in terms of a conditional or biconditional pattern. A comprehensive attempt to compare conditional reasoning performance across contexts, using both inference and truth table tasks, has been made by M. C. Ellis. He identified a total of eight distinct linguistic uses of conditional statements which he labelled temporal, causal, promise, threat, tip, warning, universal and intentional.
