In Defense of Logical Minds

According to the received view in the psychology of reasoning, Piaget’s view that F Humans naturally develop a context-free deductive reasoning scheme at the level of elementary first-order logic. has been overthrown by the poor performance of educated adult subjects on specific logic problems (e.g., Wason’s selection task). We propose that Piaget’s F (or at least a variant) is alive and well, because the subjects in question are simply victims of a defective education. With a modicum of the right sort of logic training, humans reason deductively on logic problems well enough to vindicate Piaget. The Received View: Piaget Dead on