How do people make deductions? The orthodox answer is that they follow formal rules of
inference. The authors repudiate this theory. They argue that people reason by building a …

The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C.
The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. …

… Research has shown that rational thought is more imaginative than cognitive scientists had
supposed; in The Rational Imagination, Ruth Byrne argues that imaginative thought is more …

Deductive reasoning is widely regarded as an activity central to human intelligence, and as
such has attracted an increasing amount of psychological study in recent years. In this first …

Three experiments are reported which show that in certain contexts subjects reject instances
of the valid modus ponens and modus tollens inference form in conditional arguments. For …

Describes a new theory of propositional reasoning, that is, deductions depending on if, or,
and, and not. The theory proposes that reasoning is a semantic process based on mental …

People spontaneously create counterfactual alternatives to reality when they think “if only”
or “what if” and imagine how the past could have been different. The mind computes …

We carried out two experiments to investigate how people reason about the spatial relations
among objects. The experiments were designed to test a theory of spatial inference based …

Counterfactual thoughts about what might have been (‘if only…') are pervasive in everyday
life. They are related to causal thoughts, they help people learn from experience and they …

Counterfactuals about what could have happened are increasingly used in an array of Artificial
Intelligence (AI) applications, and especially in explainable AI (XAI). Counterfactuals can …