Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content

by Philip N. Johnson-Laird and Peter C. Wason

'Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?' 'To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.' 'The dog did nothing in the night-time.' 'That was the curious incident, ' remarked Sherlock Holmes. The quotation from A. Conan Doyle with which this book begins, is a delightfully appropriate summation of the authors' point of view garnered from their fifteen years of experiments on the psychology of reasoning. Dr. Wason...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674721268
• ISBN13: 9780674721265
• Release Date: January 1972
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Depends on What You Want

The debate between Philip Johnson-Laird and Lance Rips is fairly well-known in the cognitive sciences. If one wants to catch up with the debate, this book is not the place to start. It's a fine book, but it's not central. A more efficient place to start would be with J-L's _Human and Machine Thinking_. J-L has published more books on the subject than has Rips, but that just means that some of J-L's books aren't really critical to understanding the debate. This is one of those. In it, he makes a lot of the same claims found in his _Human and Machine Thinking_, but the topic is not so focused as in HMT. For a comparison of the statistics and main arguments of the two views, get HMT and the book by Rips, which I have also reviewed.However, if one wants to be thorough about one's research and would like to compare subtle changes in the way J-L's side of the debate has been expressed over the years, as well as seeing more material that may be interesting to follow up, definitely get this book. J-L and Wason have written a fascinating volume. I even recommend it for reading on rainy Sunday afternoons.