Linguistic processes in deductive reasoning.

Abstract

The present paper develops a theory to specify in part how a person stores and searches through information retained from sentences. The theory states that (a) functional relations, like the abstract subject-predicate relation which underlies sentences, are more available from memory than other, less basic kinds of information; (6) certain positive adjectives, like long, are stored in memory in a less complex and more accessible form than their opposites, like short; and (c) listeners can only retrieve, from memory, information which is congruent at a deep level to the information they are searching for. The present theory, unlike previous ones, correctly predicts the principal differences in the solution times of 8 types of two-term series problems and 32 types of three-term series problems (e.g., // John isn't as bad as Pete, and Dick isn't as good as Pete, then who is worst?). It also accounts for previous observations on children solving these problems and explains other phenomena in deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning has often been studied in particular types of reasoning problems. The strategies suggested for their solution have therefore often been of limited generality : they apply in one kind of problem and that kind alone. The present paper proposes, instead, that reasoning is accomplished mainly through certain very general linguistic processes, the same mental operations