Definition
Pragmatic reasoning schemas are linguistically based contextual schemas that have an underlying structure that is determined by people’s interpretations of classes of events. This structure determines the kinds of inferences that people make with different schemas corresponding to different logical patterns.
Theoretical Background
The notion of pragmatic reasoning schemas was first proposed by Cheng and Holyoak in 1985as a way of synthesizing research into the Wason selection task. This is a reasoning task proposed by Peter Wason in 1965 as a way of showing the difficulty many educated adults have in reasoning according to the rules of logic. The standard task presents people with a conditional rule, of the form “If there is a vowel on one side of the card, then there will be an even number on the other side”. They are then shown four cards which have (1) a vowel, (2) a consonant, (3) an even number,...
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References
Cheng, P. W., & Holyoak, K. J. (1985). Pragmatic reasoning schemas. Cognitive Psychology, 17, 391–416.
Cheng, P. W., Holyoak, K. J., Nisbett, R. E., & Oliver, L. M. (1986). Pragmatic versus syntactic approaches to training deductive reasoning. Cognitive Psychology, 18, 293–328.
Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Cognition, 31, 187–276.
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Markovits, H. (2012). Pragmatic Reasoning Schemas. In: Seel, N.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of the Sciences of Learning. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_656
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-1428-6_656
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