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Deduction

Deduction

Hardcover

Series: Psychology Revivals

General PsychologyLogic

ISBN10: 1041374410
ISBN13: 9781041374411
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Sep 1 2026
Pages: 264
Weight: 1.20
Height: 0.63 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

How do people make deductions? The orthodox answer is that they follow formal rules of inference. Originally published in 1991, and reissued here with a new preface, the authors of Deduction repudiate this theory. They argue that people reason by building a model of the state of affairs, formulating a conclusion based on this model, and searching for alternative models that refute it. Formal rules work syntactically; mental models work semantically. The theories therefore make different predictions about the difficulty of deductions. The book reports experiments that compared these predictions in the main domains of deduction: propositional reasoning; relational reasoning; and quantificational reasoning. In each domain, the results corroborated the model theory and ran counter to the rule theories.

Also from

Johnson-Laird, P. N.

Also in

General Psychology