Theories of reasoning and the computational explanation of everyday inference

Oaksford, Mike and Chater, N. (1995) Theories of reasoning and the computational explanation of everyday inference. Thinking and Reasoning 1 (2), pp. 121-152. ISSN 1354-6783.

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Official URL: http://doi.org/10.1080/13546789508251501

Abstract

Following Marr (1982), any computational account of cognition must satisfy constraints at three explanatory levels: computational, algorithmic, and implementational. This paper focuses on the first two levels and argues that current theories of reasoning cannot provide explanations of everyday defeasible reasoning, at either level. At the algorithmic level, current theories are not computationally tractable: they do not “scale-up” to everyday defeasible inference. In addition, at the computational level, they cannot specify why people behave as they do both on laboratory reasoning tasks and in everyday life (Anderson, 1990). In current theories, logic provides the computational-level theory, where such a theory is evident at all. But logic is not a descriptively adequate computational-level theory for many reasoning tasks. It is argued that better computational-level theories can be developed using a probabilistic framework. This approach is illustrated using Oaksford and Chater's (1994) probabilistic account of Wason's selection task.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
School:	Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Science > School of Psychological Sciences
Depositing User:	Administrator
Date Deposited:	19 Sep 2016 12:52
Last Modified:	02 Aug 2023 17:26
URI:	https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/16091

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