How We Reason 1st Edition by Philip Johnson-Laird (PDF)

Description

Good reasoning can lead to success; bad reasoning can lead to catastrophe. Yet, it’s not obvious how we reason, and why we make mistakes – so much of our mental life goes on outside our awareness. In recent years huge strides have been made into developing a scientific understanding of reasoning. This book by one of the pioneers of the field, Philip Johnson-Laird, looks at the mental processes that underlie our reasoning. It provides the most accessible account yet of the science of reasoning. We can all reason from our childhood onwards – but how? ‘How We Reason’ outlines a bold approach to understanding reasoning. According to this approach, we don’t rely on the laws of logic or probability – we reason by thinking about what’s possible, we reason by seeing what is common to the possibilities. As the book shows, this approach can answer many of the questions about how we reason, and what causes mistakes in our reasoning that can lead to disasters such as Chernobyl. It shows why our irrational fears may become psychological illnesses, why terrorists develop ‘crazy’ ideologies, and how we can act in order to improve our reasoning. The book ends by looking at the role of reasoning in three extraordinary case histories: the Wright brothers’ use of analogies in inventing their flyer, the cryptanalysts’ deductions in breaking the German’s Enigma code in World War II, and Dr. John Snow’s inductive reasoning in discovering how cholera spread from one person to another. Accessible, stimulating, and controversial, How we Reason presents a bold new approach to understanding one of the most intriguing facets of being human.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Philip Johnson-Laird’s most recent book is about how we reason, as we might infer from its title. It continues the discussion of mental models begun in his 1986 book titled–wait for it–

⭐. The author describes the mental mechanisms used to reason at a level of detail useful to researchers in this area. Those interested in a discussion of the steps and strategies of reasoning as non-specialists see it might be better served by Frank Yates’

⭐or

⭐.This book dives into the details. Previous approaches have defined reason as “[a] set of processes that construct and evaluate implications among sets of propositions.” Contrary to our expectations, the author argues, formal logic cannot be the basis for human reason. Johnson-Laird reviews evidence to this effect. For example, there are many valid conclusions that we never bother to draw because they are of no practical use to us. We also make systematic errors in reasoning that we would not make using logic. The content of logic problems used in research studies greatly affects their difficulty; it would not if logic were the primary process. We use knowledge to help us imagine possibilities and then evaluate the possibilities for consistency with other evidence.Constrained by the span of short term memory, the strength of our general intellectual abilities, and our level of expertise, we construct and manipulate mental models of the problems we reason about. “…[F]rom the meanings of sentences in connected discourse, the listener implicitly sets up a much abbreviated and not especially linguistic model of the narrative … Where the model is incomplete, material may even be unwittingly invented to render the memory more meaningful or more plausible.” We can manipulate these models in a number of ways, including updating them with new information, combining two models when appropriate, searching for confirming evidence or information, and using counterexamples to challenge a model’s validity.Mental model theory explains a number of systematic errors human beings make when reasoning. For example, the difficulty of reasoning problems is related to the number of models that must be held simultaneously in memory to work through them. And we exhibit a recurring bias to use a single model to reason about situations that have more possibilities than we can keep track of. We oversimplify. Consistent with model theory, we have difficulty reasoning with information about what is false about a situation. Our models can be both informed and misled by our knowledge and experience.The real key to human rationality is our ability to recognize and grasp the implications of counterexamples. Johnson-Laird redefines reason as “…the ability to construct models from perception, description, and knowledge, to formulate novel but parsimonious conclusions from these models, and to grasp the force of counterexamples to these conclusions.” He explores the implications of the model account of reasoning for the childhood development of mental abilities, strategies for improving reasoning, and the development and deployment of expertise.The author closes with a trio of insightful chapters that employ model theory to understand reasoning by experts in diverse fields. Case studies include the Wright brothers’ innovations in powered flight, efforts by cryptographers to reverse-engineer the Enigma code machine during WWII, and early epidemiological studies of infection patterns during a nineteenth-century cholera epidemic.This book is recommended to psychologists and their students studying human reason. It is also accessible by and beneficial to those without backgrounds in psychology. Johnson-Laird’s arguments are plain and his examples are clear. He is an expert in the study of reason and presents his conclusions about its nature formed during decades of careful research.

⭐This book has earned my confidence, not only because of the author’s excellent writing and argument but because he acknowledges how little we know about human reason.I have found myself thinking about certain chapters when taking walks–for instance, “The Puzzles of If,” where Professor Johnson-Laird shows that “if-then” statements (presumably straightforward) actually come in great variety and require different kinds of reasoning.The chapter on the Wright brothers should be required reading for aspiring teachers. Children are often told that the Wright brothers were successful because they never gave up. Certainly their perseverance helped, but it was not enough in itself. Johnson-Laird argues convincingly that what set them apart was their reasoning. He explains this in detail–and the details are much more intersting than bland stories about how they kept on trying and never gave up.The central argument about mental models is compelling, and I enjoy everything along the way–the logic puzzles, the descriptions of experiments, the stories. There are just a few flaws in wording that I have spotted. For instance, on p. 161, it reads, “Is it true that optimists believe that optimists exist?” In order to make sense in context, it really should read, “Is it true that an optimist is anyone who believes that optimists exist?” But that is a minor quibble.The Auden quotes are wonderful throughout, both in themselves and in relation to the text. I am grateful that the author stayed with Auden instead of quoting from many different authors. It seems that this may have something to do with the spirit of the book. Good reasoning is not flighty.One more thing I appreciate: the book has meaning for the layperson and scholar alike. It is written in clear, lively language, and it does not condescend. There is no trace of jargon or anything faddish. The author even casts doubt on some of his own ideas.One of the Auden quotes (from his poem “Natural Linguistics”) reads,”signals of interrogation, friendship, threat and appeasement,instantly taken in, seldom, if ever, misread.”One could say this for the intellectual honesty of the book, which comes through both instantly and slowly.

⭐Brillant! Phil Johnson-Laird gave us another great book that summarizes the current knowledge and research concerned with human thinking. As always, his prose is clear, precise, and elegant. The experience and originality of his successful theory of mental models theory find in this book the best updated revision. However, other important theories of human reasoning are also considered in dialog with the mental models theory. I think that this book is a kind of foundation of the future psychology of reasoning because the author’s perspective is clearly open and integrative. He knows how the mental models theory promoted important steps forward and the main lines for future research. Other remarkable aspect of this great book is the topic it covers. Several topics from experimental paradigms that remain inside the cognition lab to the most common situations of everyday personal and social life are included. This is probably our best hope for the future of the understanting of human reasoning.

⭐I love this book!!! How we reason by Philip Johnson-Laird, It is the best book I have read!!! I recommend!!!

⭐Very insightful

⭐Philip Johnson-Laird is a personal intellectual hero of mine since I discovered his wonderful little book

⭐The Computer and the Mind: An Introduction to Cognitive Science (Second Edition)

⭐, which is a superb general introduction to the field of cognitive science. This book is rather more specialised, focussing on quite a specific area of the cognitive science domain, that of our reasoning faculties. The primary message of the book can be quite simply stated as being that we carry out reasoning tasks, of deduction and induction from premises, verifying them and so forth, by constructing mental models of the various possible states of affairs that a set of premises describes. We reason by paring down the list of such models as new premises are considered, until we are left with a single one, whereupon we have derived a new piece of knowledge from the given premises. The limitations of the cognitive architecture of the brain determine that we adopt strategies that minimise the number of models that must be held in mind simultaneously, in particular we have an in-built bias to construct models of what can be as opposed to what cannot. This latter feature Johnson Laird has coined the principle of truth. The consequent theory of mental models allows detailed predictions to be formulated about the limitations of human reason, and ways in which it can break down, all too often in ways unsuspected by the reasoner. These predictions have given rise to numerous, admirably cunning psychological experiments, which taken together make an impressive case for the mental model theory of Johnson Laird and his numerous co-workers. Alternative theories are considered. One such class of theories that has been popular, but is now losing ground, are those based on the various kinds of formal logic, propositional, modal, etc, that presume that we reason by breaking out the logical structure from information with which we are presented. Effectively differentiating the logical form from the contextual content. This approach proves to be unrealistic when actual real world knowledge so frequently has to constrain, or `modulate’ the significance of the logical form of the premises with which we deal. Other notions that the mental models theory successfully combats are those that suggest that we have a variety of dedicated modules in the brain for dealing with different categories of reasoning. These might be say with regard to causation in the physics of movement and social, or deontic reasoning by which we analyse obligation and moral choice. Careful experimentation suggests that there is no evidence to support the idea that we reason differently, or more or less consistently or accurately in disparate domains.This is a book that can be tackled by the layman. Though a large amount of the experimental evidence in these matters is statistical, the book presents the keys results as summarised from the statistics without bludgeoning you with the details. On the other hand this is a reasonably challenging book, demanding to be read with a great deal of care. In particular the nature of the material discussed obliges its illustration with frequent examples that take the form of logical puzzles, of varying degrees of difficulty, often couched to be deceptively so, one way or the other. It actually took me several weeks to read, over many short sittings. It might well be possible to read it just for the conclusions presented without directly engaging with the illustrative puzzles, but I would imagine that the force of the argument would be rather blunted if approached thus.The book has little to say about memory, by which I mean how our knowledge of the world is represented in long term memory, and how it must be organised for our reasoning processes to be able to effectively activate and manipulate it. Presumably the processes of reasoning that Johnson Laird discusses are shifting patterns of activation within this substrate, and it is competition between these patterns that gives rise to our decisions and understanding about the world we inhabit. The means of organising the information that constitutes our massed knowledge of the world, for free and natural utilisation by processes of reasoning is, to my mind, the deepest mystery of cognitive science. This mystery is what stands between us and the creation of a revolutionary class of truly thinking machines, dreamed of for so long in science fiction, but still bafflingly remote. Alas, our current science lacks the theoretical models, and the practical imaging techniques to verify them, and is as yet incapable of shedding light on this much tougher part of the puzzle. But it is to be hoped that by clarifying what can be understood about our reasoning we might perhaps garner the insights by which we might begin to infer this hidden structure of our knowledge of the world. As such this book takes us on a stimulating journey into new areas of our understanding, but also casts into relief adjacent areas of ignorance.

⭐Der Autor versucht beständig, das Ideal des menschlichen Denkens dem des Computers gleichzustellen, d.h. er präsentiert immerzu irgendwelche – auch z.T. höchst absurde – Denkaufgaben (ähnlich die eines Intelligenztests) und stellt als richtige Lösung dann immer die logisch-abstrakte dar, so wie sie ein Computer generiert.Das maschinelle Vorgehen produziert immer eine Lösung, weil es so programmiert ist, es produziert ein ‘richtig’ oder ‘falsch’. Das entspricht aber nicht der Art und Weise wie menschliches Denken funktioniert oder nicht funktioniert. Kurz gesagt, wäre so manches Mal die richtige Lösung zu sagen: “das ist vollkommen absurd”. Das wird vom Autor aber natürlich nicht zugelassen. Und so geht das die ganze Zeit….. Ein Computer produziert immer eine abstrakt richtige Lösung, aber ‘richtig’ ist eben nicht immer vernünftig. Die Vernunft ist der abstrakten Logik aber überlegen. Ein Computer könnte – wenn er ein lebendes Wesen wäre – in freier Wildbahn keine 10 Minuten überleben. Aber der Mensch kann das. Also ist die menschliche Intelligenz der maschinellen überlegen. Mehr muss man dazu gar nicht sagen.

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