A developmental mental model theory of conditional reasoning
Caroline Gauffroy, Pierre Barrouillet · 2013
Piaget considered conditional reasoning as a late achievement that depends on the construction of formal operations isomorphic in structure to formal logic during adolescence (Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). It is often overlooked, as far as propositional reasoning is concerned, that Piaget did not conceive these operations as inferential mechanisms for deriving conclusions from premises. Instead, when reasoning about a system of two propositions p and q, these operations would be the set of all the possible combinations of the products p. q, p. ¬q, ¬p. q, and ¬p. ¬q (e.g., p ⊃ q, “if p then q”, is an operation combining p. q, ¬p. q, and ¬p. ¬q). Transformations could be executed on these operations in such way that, for example, it can be understood that the operation p. ¬q is the inverse of the operation p ⊃ q. When fully developed and properly coordinated, these transformations would constitute a structured whole known as the INRC group occurring only in late adolescence and enabling propositional reasoning.