In this provocative book, Lance Rips describes a unified theory of natural deductive reasoning and fashions a working model of deduction, with strong experimental support, that is capable of playing a central role in mental life.Rips argues that certain inference principles are so central to our notion of intelligence and rationality that they deserve serious psychological investigation to determine their role in individuals' beliefs and conjectures.
Much of current cognitive science is a debate between two views of thinking—thinking as governed by mental rules and thinking as governed by similarity among ideas. Contributors to this volume explore these contrasting views in research on reasoning and concepts, and consider their merits from the perspectives of cognition, development, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. The book evaluates the potential of each view to describe human cognition and examines whether systems compatible with these different perspectives might work together in explaining thought.
