Abstract
Reasoning research has focussed mainly on the type of cognitive processes involved when representing premises and when producing conclusions. But less is known about the factors that guide these representational and inferential processes. What premises are actually taken as input in reasoning? And what conclusions are intended? In this paper it is argued that considerations of relevance (Sperber and Wilson, Relevance: communication and cognition. Blackwell, Oxford, 1995) are helpful for addressing these issues as a pragmatic analysis of two sorts of tasks is carried out, Wason’s 2-4-6 problem (Study 1) and a conditional reasoning problem (Study 2). Study 1 indicates that the way this task is communicated may encourage participants to consider misleading information as highly relevant for solving it. Two experiments go on to show that when the relevance of misleading information is contextually diminished, participants are more efficient at providing the correct solution. Study 2 compares the production rate of two sorts of conclusions: logically valid but weakly relevant conclusions and invalid but relevant and pragmatically justified conclusions. This study shows that the relevance of conclusions determines to a large extent whether or not they will be produced.
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Notes
Wason (1968) ends his chapter with the following remark: “In the real world, as opposed to the psychological laboratory, the fixated, obsessional behaviour of some the subjects would be analogous to that of a person who is thinking within a closed system—a system which defies refutation, e.g., existentialism and the majority of religions. These experiments demonstrate, on a miniature scale, how dogmatic thinking and the refusal to entertain the possibility of alternatives can easily result in error” (see p. 174 in Wason 1968).
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The author would like to thank Ira Noveck and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on a previous version of this paper.
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Van der Henst, JB. Symposium on “Cognition and Rationality: Part I” Relevance effects in reasoning. Mind & Society 5, 229–245 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-006-0019-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11299-006-0019-x