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58Dissonances in theories of number understandingBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (6): 671-687. 2008.Traditional theories of how children learn the positive integers start from infants' abilities in detecting the quantity of physical objects. Our target article examined this view and found no plausible accounts of such development. Most of our commentators appear to agree that no adequate developmental theory is presently available, but they attempt to hold onto a role for early enumeration. Although some defend the traditional theories, others introduce new basic quantitative abilities, new me…Read more
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29Core Cognition and its AftermathPhilosophical Topics 45 (1): 157-179. 2017.A current and very influential theory in psychology holds that infants have innate, perceptually informed systems that endow them with surprisingly high-level concepts—for example, concepts of cardinality and causality. Proponents of core cognition hold that these initial concepts then provide the building blocks for later adult ideas within these domains. This paper reviews the evidence for core cognition and argues that these systems aren’t sufficient to explain how children learn their way to…Read more
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77Argumentative Thinking: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Psychology and ArgumentationInformal Logic 29 (4): 327-336. 2009.This special issue of Informal Logic brings together a num-ber of traditions from the psychology and philosophy of argument. Psycho-logists’ interest in argument typically arises in understanding how indivi-duals form and change their beliefs. Thus, theories of argument can serve as models of the structure of justi-fications for belief, as methods of diagnosing errors in beliefs, and as prototypes for learning. The articles in this issue illustrate all three of these connections
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176Reasoning: Studies of Human Inference and its Foundations (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2008.This interdisciplinary work is a collection of major essays on reasoning: deductive, inductive, abductive, belief revision, defeasible, cross cultural, conversational, and argumentative. They are each oriented toward contemporary empirical studies. The book focuses on foundational issues, including paradoxes, fallacies, and debates about the nature of rationality, the traditional modes of reasoning, as well as counterfactual and causal reasoning. It also includes chapters on the interface betwee…Read more
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14The Psychology of Proof: Deductive Reasoning in Human ThinkingMIT Press. 1994.Lance Rips describes a unified theory of natural deductive reasoning and fashions a working model of deduction, with strong experimental support, that is capable of playing a central role in mental life.
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35Possible Objects: Topological Approaches to IndividuationCognitive Science 44 (11). 2020.We think of the world around us as divided into physical objects like toasters and daisies, rather than solely as a smear of properties like yellow and smooth. How do we single out these objects? One theory of object concepts uses part‐of relations and relations of connectedness. According to this proposal, an object is a connected spatial item of maximal extent: Any other connected item that overlaps (i.e., shares a part with) the object must be a part of that object. This article reports four …Read more
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1233Experimenting with (Conditional) PerfectionIn Stefan Kaufmann, David Over & Ghanshyam Sharma (eds.), Conditionals: Logic, Semantics, Psychology, . forthcoming.Conditional perfection is the phenomenon in which conditionals are strengthened to biconditionals. In some contexts, “If A, B” is understood as if it meant “A if and only if B.” We present and discuss a series of experiments designed to test one of the most promising pragmatic accounts of conditional perfection. This is the idea that conditional perfection is a form of exhaustification—that is a strengthening to an exhaustive reading, triggered by a question that the conditional answers. If a sp…Read more
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14Children's Understanding of the Natural Numbers’ StructureCognitive Science 42 (6): 1945-1973. 2018.When young children attempt to locate numbers along a number line, they show logarithmic (or other compressive) placement. For example, the distance between “5” and “10” is larger than the distance between “75” and “80.” This has often been explained by assuming that children have a logarithmically scaled mental representation of number (e.g., Berteletti, Lucangeli, Piazza, Dehaene, & Zorzi, 2010; Siegler & Opfer, 2003). However, several investigators have questioned this argument (e.g., Barth &…Read more
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45Tracing the identity of objectsPsychological Review 113 (1): 1-30. 2006.This article considers how people judge the identity of objects (e.g., how people decide that a description of an object at one time, t₀, belongs to the same object as a description of it at another time, t₁). The authors propose a causal continuer model for these judgments, based on an earlier theory by Nozick (1981). According to this model, the 2 descriptions belong to the same object if (a) the object at t₁ is among those that are causally close enough to be genuine continuers of the origina…Read more
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37Identifying and counting objects: The role of sortal conceptsCognition 145 (C): 89-103. 2015.Sortal terms, such as table or horse, are count nouns (akin to a basic-level terms). According to some theories, the meaning of sortals provides conditions for telling objects apart (individuating objects, e.g., telling one table from a second) and for identifying objects over time (e.g., determining that a particular horse at one time is the same horse at another). A number of psychologists have proposed that sortal concepts likewise provide psychologically real conditions for individuating and…Read more
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16Parts of activities: Reply to Fellbaum and Miller (1990)Psychological Review 97 (4): 571-575. 1990.If people believe that one activity is a kind of another, they also tend to believe that the second activity is a part of the first. For example, they assert that deciding is a kind of thinking and that thinking is a part of deciding. C. Fellbaum and G. A. Miller's (see record 1991-03356-001) explanation for this phenomenon is based on the idea that people interpret part of in the domain of verbs as a type of logical entailment. Their explanation, however, suffers from at least 2 deficiencies. F…Read more
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29Folk psychology of mental activitiesPsychological Review 96 (2): 187-207. 1989.A central aspect of people's beliefs about the mind is that mental activities—for example, thinking, reasoning, and problem solving—are interrelated, with some activities being kinds or parts of others. In common-sense psychology, reasoning is a kind of thinking and reasoning is part of problem solving. People's conceptions of these mental kinds and parts can furnish clues to the ordinary meaning of these terms and to the differences between folk and scientific psychology. In this article, we us…Read more
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23Lines of Thought: Central Concepts in Cognitive PsychologyOup Usa. 2011.Lines of Thought addresses how we are able to think about abstract possibilities: How can we think about math, despite the immateriality of numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities? How are we able to think about what might have happened if history had taken a different turn? Questions like these turn up in nearly every part of cognitive science, and they are central to our human position of having only limited knowledge concerning what is or might be true.
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88Reasoning About Truth in First-Order LogicJournal of Logic, Language and Information 22 (1): 115-137. 2013.First, we describe a psychological experiment in which the participants were asked to determine whether sentences of first-order logic were true or false in finite graphs. Second, we define two proof systems for reasoning about truth and falsity in first-order logic. These proof systems feature explicit models of cognitive resources such as declarative memory, procedural memory, working memory, and sensory memory. Third, we describe a computer program that is used to find the smallest proofs in …Read more