Understanding Uncertainty with Abstract Conditional Premises

Venet, Michèle; Markovits, Henry

doi:10.1353/mpq.2001.0006

Cited by 30 publications

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“…In addition, representing a multicausal structure based on concrete alternatives was more difficult than the same structure based on more abstract hypothetical alternatives (Gentner and Medina 1998). The specific difficulty that participants found in successfully extracting the structure from specific alternatives is in turn consistent with empirical results showing that understanding abstract uncertainty is very difficult even among well-educated university students (e.g., Venet and Markovits 2001). In fact, this difficulty provides a very plausible explanation for the lack of transfer between concrete reasoning with familiar premises and abstract reasoning (Markovits and Lortie Forgues 2010).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

“…Such premises do not have direct referents to existing knowledge, and thus do not allow use of empirical knowledge to generate uncertainty responses to the AC and DA inferences. Supporting this is the observation that relatively high levels of correct responding to the AC and DA inferences with abstract premises are not found until late adolescence (Markovits and Vachon 1990;Venet and Markovits 2001). When asked to reason with abstract premises, the most common pattern involves accepting the MP inference and also accepting the AC and DA inferences (something which corresponds to a biconditional interpretation of the conditional relationship).…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

“…However, it is much more difficult, even in principle, to understand how people can develop the ability to reason logically with premises about which they have no knowledge at all, of which the clearest form is abstract reasoning. In fact, such reasoning has been found to be extremely difficult even for educated University level students (Markovits and Vachon 1990;Venet and Markovits 2001). A common strategy for developing such forms of abstract abilities involves attempting to generalize from specific examples to more general principles.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Using analogy to improve abstract conditional reasoning in adolescents: not as easy as it looks

Markovits

Doyon

2010

Eur J Psychol Educ

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reasoning refers to the ability to reason logically with premises that do not allow reference to knowledge about the real world. This form of reasoning is complex and difficult, and at the same time, it is critical for understanding science and mathematics. Two studies examined the use of analogy as a method to bridge reasoning with familiar content and abstract reasoning among older adolescents. The results showed that the ability to make an appropriate analogy depends on reasoning ability. Neither of the two procedures used resulted in an improvement in abstract reasoning. However, generating an inappropriate analogy actually decreased abstract reasoning performance among students who showed greater initial levels of reasoning ability. These results highlight the problems associated with using familiar reasoning as a basis for learning abstract reasoning skills.Keywords Reasoning . Abstract . Analogy . Learning Logical reasoning involves the ability to make necessary deductions on the basis of some given premises which are considered to be true. The nature of deductive reasoning is an important question for many domains of study, such as education, philosophy, and cognitive psychology (e.g., Bennett 2003; Evans and Over 2004). The developmental study of reasoning was initially framed by Piaget's seminal studies on formal thinking (e.g., Inhelder and Piaget 1958). According to the Piagetian framework, cognitive development proceeds more or less ineluctably through a sequence of stages, reaching its culmination in the stage of formal reasoning. One of the major characteristics of this stage of thinking is the ability to reason deductively in an abstract way, that is, to reason strictly on the basis of the logical form of an argument while ignoring any information provided by the content of the premises. The ability Eur J Psychol Educ (2011) 26:355-372 to reason abstractly in a logical way is particularly important for understanding the underlying structure of both mathematical reasoning and the physical sciences since these require the ability to make logical deductions about objects with which people often have no experience or direct contact.Unfortunately, one of the clearest conclusions of the many studies that have examined reasoning is that deductive reasoning is difficult even for educated adults (Bucci 1978;Klaczynski and Narashimham 1998;Markovits 1985), and that one of the most remarkable characteristics of reasoning in children and adults is its variability. Many studies have documented the fact that when the specific content of premises varies, the inferences that are drawn change (Cummins 1995;Cummins et al. 1991;Markovits and Vachon 1990;Thompson 1994). These studies suggest that people tend to make inferences in a way that capitalizes on their empirical knowledge about premises, although the nature of such processes remains an open question (e.g., Markovits and Barrouillet 2002;Oaksford and Chater 2001;Overton 1990).Irrespective of the specific model, understanding how people reason with premises ...

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 79%

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confidence: 97%

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confidence: 99%

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Using analogy to improve abstract conditional reasoning in adolescents: not as easy as it looks

Markovits

Doyon

2010

Eur J Psychol Educ

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“…The results of these studies, and of many others, do show that a significant proportion of even educated adults appear to reason with meaningful premises in ways that are consistent with the model that we have presentedthat is, even when making "logical" inferences, they will activate and use their knowledge of the premises. This does not imply that more expert reasoners are not capable of more abstract strategies (Venet & Markovits, 2001). However, developmental studies, previous studies with university students, and the present results indicate that expert reasoners are relatively rare and relatively old.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Suppression of valid inferences and knowledge structures: The curious effect of producing alternative antecedents on reasoning with causal conditionals

Markovits

Potvin

2001

Memory & Cognition

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The ability to make logical inferences is one of the key components of human reasoning. There has been a great deal of empirical and theoretical attention given to models of how humans make deductions. However, there is one very basic aspect of logical reasoning that has curiously received relatively little attention. One of the critical aspects of logical reasoning is the explicit requirement to disregard the empirical truth of the premises used to make inferences, a requirement that is often expressed by the instructions to "suppose that the premises are true." Yet, although we know that following such instructions is not always easy for even educated reasoners, there is no clear model of just what is involved in doing so, and why this might be difficult. This paper attempts to suggest such a model and to examine it by looking at a paradoxical phenomenon concerning reasoning with causal conditionals.Studies of deductive reasoning in both adults and children have clearly shown that people often make deductions that are not consistent with the rules of formal logic. In the context of the focus of this paper, the most interesting of these cases concerns the logical rule known as modus ponens (MP). This requires a reasoner to suppose that a given "If P then Q" conditional relation is true, and then to deduce that "P is true" implies that "Q is true." Modus ponens is the simplest of the deductive inferences that can be made in conditional logic. Developmental studies have shown that very young children can reliably make the MP inference (Ennis, 1976) before any of the other conditional inferences, such as modus tollens (MT), and so on. Adults generally tend to endorse the MP inference at a very high rate (Evans, 1993). In fact, both of the major theories of human reasoning consider that making the MP inference requires a minimal amount of cognitive effort. Rules theorists (e.g., Braine & O'Brien, 1991;Rips, 1994) consider MP to be one of the most basic of the inference rules that they claim characterize how people make deductive inferences. Braine (1990) has even proposed that the MP inference rule should be considered a logical primitive with biological origins. Mental model theory considers that the MP inference requires the least costly of the possible representations of the conditional (the "iniPreparation of this manuscript was supported by grants from the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l'Aide à la Recherche (FCAR) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council (NSERC) to H.M. The authors thank David Over and Denise Cummins for their helpful comments on a previous version of this manuscript. Correspondence should be addressed to H. Markovits, Department of Psychology, University of Quebec, C.P. 8888, Succ. "A," Montreal, PQ, H3C 3P8 Canada (e-mail: markovits.henry@uqam.ca). Suppression of valid inferences and knowledgestructures: The curious effect of producing alternative antecedents on reasoning with causal conditionals HENRY MARKOVITS and FRÉDÉRIC POTVIN University of Quebec, Montreal, Quebec, C...

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“…In addition, there is evidence that abstract reasoning is facilitated by realistic context. Despite the abstract nature of the premises, the development of abstract reasoning has been found to be reliant on appropriate access to empirical knowledge (Venet & Markovits, 2001). Similarly, in adults, working memory capacity is related to the successful activation of relevant background knowledge when people reason with familiar causal conditionals (De Neys, Schaeken, & d'Ydewalle, 2005), and higher ability people are also more inclined to retrieve elements from their long-term memory that are more remotely associated with the given context (Verschueren, De Neys, Schaeken, & d'Ydewalle, 2002).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How smart do you need to be to get it wrong? The role of cognitive capacity in the development of heuristic-based judgment

Morsanyi

Handley

2008

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Understanding Uncertainty with Abstract Conditional Premises

Cited by 30 publications

References 33 publications

Using analogy to improve abstract conditional reasoning in adolescents: not as easy as it looks

Using analogy to improve abstract conditional reasoning in adolescents: not as easy as it looks

Suppression of valid inferences and knowledge structures: The curious effect of producing alternative antecedents on reasoning with causal conditionals

How smart do you need to be to get it wrong? The role of cognitive capacity in the development of heuristic-based judgment

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