Cognition and Conditionals

Mike Oaksford is Professor of Psychology and Head of School at Birkbeck College London. He was a PhD student and subsequently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh. He was then a lecturer at the University of Wales, Bangor, and a senior lecturer at the University of Warwick, before moving to Cardiff University in 1996 as Professor of Experimental Psychology, a post he held until 2005 when he moved to Birkbeck College, University of London. He has authored or edited seven books (four with OUP) and over 100 articles. His research interests are in the area of human reasoning and argumentation. In particular, with Nick Chater and Ulrike Hahn, he has been developing a Bayesian probabilistic approach to classical deductive reasoning tasks and to the classical fallacies of informal argumentation. He also studies the way the emotions interact with reasoning and decision making processes. Nick Chater is Professor of Cognitive and Decision Sciences at University College London. He was a PhD student at the Centre for Cognitive Science, University of Edinburgh. He was then a lecturer at University of College London, before moving to lectureships at Edinburgh and then at Oxford. In 1996 he moved to Warwick University as Professor of Psychology, a post he held until 2005 when he moved back to University College London. He has authored or edited seven books (three with OUP) and over one hundred and fifty scientific publications in psychology, philosophy, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. His research explores formal models of inference, choice, and language.

1. Cognition and conditionals: An Introduction ; WORKING MEMORY: FUNCTION, REPRESENTATION, AND PROCESS ; LOGIC ; 2. The mental logic theory of conditional propositions ; 3. Conditionals and possibilities ; 4. Logic and/in psychology: The paradoxes of material implication and psychologism in the cognitive science of human reasoning ; 5. The logical response to a noisy world ; PROBABILITY ; 6. Conditionals and probability ; 7. Causal discounting and conditional reasoning in children ; 8. Conditionals and non-constructive reasoning ; 9. The conditional in mental probability logic ; LONG TERM MEMORY: FUNCTION, REPRESENTATION, AND PROCESS ; LOGIC ; 10. Semantic memory retrieval, mental models, and the development of conditional inferences in children ; 11. Counterexample retrieval and inhibition during conditional reasoning: Direct evidence from memory probing ; PROBABILITY ; 12. How semantic memory processes temper causal inferences ; 13. A successive-conditionalization approach to conditional reasoning ; 14. Pragmatic conditionals, conditional pragmatics, and the pragmatic component of conditional reasoning ; INTEGRATIVE APPROACHES ; 15. Reasoning with conditionals in artificial intelligence ; 16. Towards a reconciliation of mental model theory and probabilistic theories ; 17. Conditional inference and constraint satisfaction: Reconciling mental models and the probabilistic approach? ; 18. Towards a metacognitive dual process theory of conditional reasoning ; 19. A multi-layered dual-process approach to conditional reasoning ; 20. Two aspects of reasoning competence: A challenge for current accounts and a call for new conceptual tools ; EPILOGUE ; 21. Open issues in the cognitive science of conditionals