Is everyday experience dysfunctional for the development of conditional reasoning?

The Facilitating Effect of the Hierarchical Organisation of Concepts to the Syllogistic Reasoning

“…There is another issue -the issue of the generalisation of this skill. Cahan and Artman (1997) presumed that with the grasp of the asymmetry of the statements this ability generalises to logical tasks with non-hierarchical content. This study was not designed to confirm or refute this claim; it had merely the intent to show that hierarchical organisation as such has the facilitating effect.…”

“…Nevertheless, neither of them has been explicit about the exact nature of the cognitive changes that schooling elicits, which would allow pragmatic interpretations of the logical tasks to be set aside. Recently, in a study by Cahan and Artman (1997) several school-learned cognitive skills were tentatively revealed which may assist the task of following the rules of logic.…”

“…In case of the conditional syllogisms, understanding of the "weak" asymmetric structure excludes the biconditional-like interpretations of the implication -children do not infer if p then q; q, therefore p; they can envision the possibility of q and not p. Causal analysis as introduced, for example, in physics classes, should smooth the grasp of this asymmetry (e.g. If the bulb lights up, the material is a conductor, but it is not true that if it is a conductor, the bulb will necessarily light up) (Cahan, Artman 1997). In case of categorical syllogisms, asymmetry is required for the understanding that some members of the predicate class are not included in the subject class.…”

“…In the example given above, one has to adopt a more analytical attitude and look at the sentence in a somewhat backward manner, also considering mortals who are not people. Cahan and Artman (1997) claimed that one of the possible means to learn how to interpret these sentences correctly, i.e. asymmetrically (All A are B does not mean that All B are A) is with the explicitly hierarchical organisation of knowledge, where subordinate and superordinate categories have asymmetric relations.…”

“…Then, the universe of discourse is not delineated only by the topic determined by the subject of the sentence and consequently the predicates are interpreted more in accordance with logic. Cahan and Artman (1997) proposed that children generalise this grasp of asymmetrical interpretation of quantified sentences to other non-hierarchical contents and that this could be one way how schooling advances reasoning. However, their suggestion about the facilitating effect of hierarchical structure of concepts was merely theoretical and has not been empirically tested.…”