GROWING INTO DEDUCTION
GROWING INTO DEDUCTION

Summary/Abstract: Psychologists have experimentally studied deductive reasoning since the beginning of the 20th century. However, as we will argue, there has not been much improvement in the field until relatively recently, due to how the experiments were designed. We deem the design of the majority of conducted experiments inadequate for two reasons. The first one is that psychologists have, for the most part, ignored the development of mathematical logic and based their research on syllogistic inferences. The second reason is the influence of the view, which is dogmatically still prevalent in semantics and logic in general, that the categorical notions, such as the notion of truth, are more important than the hypothetical notions, such as the notion of deduction. The influence of this dogma has been twofold. In studies concerning logical connectives in adults and children, much more emphasis has been put on the semantical aspects of the connectives – the truth functions, than on the deductive inferences. And secondly, even in the studies that investigated deductive inferences by using formal systems, the dogma still influenced the choice of the formal system. Researchers, in general, preferred the axiomatic formal systems over the systems of natural deduction, even though the systems of the second kind are much more suitable for studying deduction.

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