The shape of reason : essays in honour of Paolo Legrenzi / edited by Vittorio Girotto and Philip N. Johnson-Laird.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Legrenzi, Paolo.

Girotto, V., 1957-2016.

Johnson-Laird, P. N. (Philip Nicholas), 1936-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Reasoning (Psychology).

Decision making.

Genre:

Festschriften.

Physical Description:

xvi, 231 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Hove ; New York : Psychology Press, 2005.

Summary:

Over the past three decades, there has been a rapid development of research on human thinking and reasoning. This volume provides a comprehensive review of this topic by looking at the important contributions Paolo Legrenzi has made to the field by bridging the gap from Gestalt ideas to modern cognitive psychology. The contributors, who include some of the most distinguished scholars of reasoning and thinking in Europe and the USA, reflect upon the ways in which he has influenced and inspired their own research, and contributed to modern approaches to human inference.

This volume draws on both traditional and new topics in reasoning and thinking to provide a wide-ranging survey of human thought. It covers creativity, problem solving, the linguistic and social aspects of reasoning and judgement, and the social and emotional aspects of decision making through telling examples, such as the cognitive mechanisms underlying consumers' attitudes towards herbal medicines. It considers a series of key questions, such as how do individuals who are unfamiliar with logic reason? And how do they make choices if they are unfamiliar with the probability calculus and decision theory?

The discussions throughout are placed within a wider research context and the contributors consider the implications of their research for the field as a whole, making the volume an essential reference for anyone investigating the processes that underlie our thinking, reasoning, and decision making in everyday life.

Contents:

Part I Problem solving 1

1 The shape of problems / Philip N. Johnson-Laird 3

The nature of creativity 6

Problems of shape 9

The discovery system 13

The development of strategies 17

Insight 20

2 Insight and self-insight in reasoning and decision making / Jonathan St. B. T. Evans 27

Gestalt ideas about thinking 28

Insight and self-insight in reasoning 31

Insight and self-insight in judgement and decision making 37

Dual process theory and the problem of insight 40

Part II Deductive reasoning 49

3 It's good to be wrong: An analysis of mistakes in relational reasoning / Walter Schaeken, Jean-Baptiste van der Henst 51

Two views of relational reasoning 51

Cognitive economy and relational reasoning 55

Task instructions and an indeterminacy-shortcut strategy 57

Mistakes on no-valid-conclusion problems 61

4 Working memory and propositional reasoning: Searching for new working memory tests / Juan A. Garcia-Madruga, Francisco Gutier Rez, Nuria Carriedo, Jose Maria Luzon, Jose Oscar Vila 69

Basic issues in working memory 69

Working memory and reasoning 72

Two new measures of working memory capacity for reasoning 80

5 Resolving contradictions / Ruth M. J. Byrne, Clare A. Walsh 91

Conditional inferences 92

Contradictions 96

Revising unfamiliar beliefs 98

Revising familiar beliefs 101

Belief revision 102

Part III Pragmatics, hypotheses, and probabilities 107

6 How to defocus in hypothesis testing: Manipulating the initial triple in the 2-4-6 problem / Jean-Paul Caverni, Sandrine Rossi, Jean-Luc Peris 109

Experiment 112

7 The representation of the task: The case of the Lawyer-Engineer problem in probability judgement / Guy Politzer, Laura Macchi 119

Part IV Probabilistic judgement 137

8 Naive probability and its model theory / David Over 139

The model theory 140

Evolution and probability 145

Probability and conditionals 151

9 Probabilistic reasoning and combinatorial analysis / Vittorio Girotto, Michel Gonzalez 161

Naive probabilistic reasoning based on combinatorics 163

Conceptual errors in combinatorial probabilistic reasoning 165

Part V Social and emotional aspects of decision making 177

10 Affect and argument / David W. Green 179

Efficiency and effectiveness 181

Initial thoughts and the effects of reflection 182

Effects of reflecting on a future possibility 184

Effects of a conjectured future possibility 186

Effects of the presupposed world 186

Predictors of opinion 187

Implications and further issues 188

11 Reasoning together: From focusing to decentring / Fabrizio Butera, Celine Buchs 193

Egocentrism, decentring and related concepts 193

Confirmation bias and decentring 195

Minority influence and decentring 197

Competence threat and focusing 198

Reducing the high-status source focusing effects 199

Generality 200

12 Heuristics and biases in attitudes towards herbal medicines / Erica Carlisle, Eldar Shafir 205

The "naturalness" heuristic 207

Illusions of effectiveness 211

Discussion: Anatomy of a heuristic 218.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

1841693448

OCLC:

56011352