Human Deductive Reasoning
Ruth M. J. Byrne · The Irish Journal of Psychology · 1989
This paper provides an introduction to the study of human deductive reasoning in cognitive science. It describes two main classes of theories of reasoning — that it depends on processes akin to formal rules of inference, and that it depends on semantic processes that construct models. The two sorts of theories have been espoused by cognitive psychologists, and they have also been developed independently by logicians and employed by researchers in Artificial Intelligence. Here it is argued that recent empirical evidence about human reasoning in the primary domains of deduction corroborates the model theory and falsifies the rule theory.