In Defense of Logical Minds

According to the received view in the psychology of reasoning, Piaget's view that F Humans naturally develop a context-free deductive reasoning scheme at the level of elementary first-order logic. has beenoverthrown by the poor performance of educated adult subjects on specific logic problems (e.g., Wason's selection task). We propose that Piaget's F (or at least a variant) is alive and well, because the subjects in question are simply victims of a defective education. With a modicum of the right sort of logic training, humans reason deductively on logic problems well enough to vindicate Piaget. The Received View: Piaget Dead on Deductive Reasoning While some elements of Piaget's thought remain very much alive today, the consensus seems to be that at least one part has long been reduced to a carcass: the part according to which F Humans naturally develop a context-free deductive reasoning scheme at the level of elementary first-order logic. 1 As evidence that F is generally regarded to be stone cold dead, one can do no better than Peter Wason's [Wason, 1995] relaxed remarks in his contributionto a recently published book [Newstead and Evans, 1995] written in his honor. Wason is credited with devising the seminal experiments that led to the rejection of F (we will visit two of the experiments below), and the remarks in question arise from his retrospection on these experiments. For example, we read: "The first formal experiments, done partly in Scotland, met with grave looks from dedicated Piagetians; the subjects' were clearly incompatible with `formal operations' " ([Wason, 1995], 296). Wason writes here and elsewhere as if F has been 1 That is, at the level of the propositional calculus plus command over some set of simple operations involv..

Conf. on Artificial Intelligence | ICAI'07 | 43 The Multi-Mind Effect

Abstract Courtesy of experiments carried out by such thinkers as Wason, Johnson-Laird, and Kahneman & Tversky, there is overwhelming empirical evidence that the vast majority of logically untrained humans are unable to reason in context-independent, normatively correct fashion. However, the multi-mind effect, which is predicted by our earlier success at teaching this kind of reasoning, and also by our general theory of human and machine reasoning, shows that while individual persons (with rare exceptions) are unable to solve problems that demand context-independent reasoning, groups of persons can often solve such problems