When nomenclature matters: Is the “new paradigm” really a new paradigm for the psychology of reasoning?

Abstract

For most its history, the psychology of reasoning was dominated by binary extensional logic. The "new paradigm" instead puts subjective degrees of belief centre stage, often represented as probabilities. The term "new paradigm" refers to Thomas Kuhn's popular theory of science, which describes scientific progress as discontinues process of alternating "normal" and "revolutionary" phases. We argue that the "new paradigm" is too vaguely defined and therefore does not allow a clear decision on what falls within its scope and what does not. We also show that before the new developments, the psychology of reasoning was neither in a phase of normal science, nor is the alleged new paradigm as revolutionary as the term suggests. Based on this analysis, we argue that the supposed opposition between a "new" and "old" paradigms hinders progress in the field. A more productive view is that current progress is developing in continuities where rival research programs stimulate each other in a fruitful way. The article closes with some topics where further connections between competing research programs are likely to promote progress in the psychology of reasoning.

The Online Processing of Hypothetical Events

“…To deal with the discrepancy between Boolean logic and human language, different approaches have been proposed in the literature (cf. Knauff & Gazzo Castañeda, 2021; Skovgaard-Olsen et al, 2021, for recent reviews).…”

“…The exact meaning of conditionals is complex and is still under hot debate (cf. Knauff & Gazzo Castañeda, 2021; Skovgaard-Olsen et al, 2021). Here, we focus on a specific aspect being generally accepted or implied by different theories, i.e., events described by the propositions P and Q are different when they are asserted alone than when they are embedded under the conditional connective If ··· then ···.…”

Coherence, not conditional meaning, accounts for the relevance effect

“…The call by Oaksford and Chater ( 2001 , 2007 ) for a paradigm shift in the psychological study of reasoning to take into account the probabilistic nature of reasoning has undergone major development in recent years and has provided many explanations for the inferences and representations of logical arguments implemented in everyday life (for comments: Over, 2009 , 2020 , 2021 ; Evans, 2012 ; Elqayam and Over, 2013 ; Oaksford and Chater, 2013 ; Baratgin et al, 2015 ; Johnson-Laird et al, 2015 ; Baratgin and Politzer, 2016 ; Elqayam, 2017 ; Knauff et al, 2021 ; Oaksford, 2021 ; Cruz, 2022 ; Douven, 2022 ; Johnson-Laird and Khemlani, 2022 ). This new paradigm gathers two families of theories that make use of Bayesian concepts in somewhat different ways (Elqayam and Evans, 2013 ; Douven et al, 2022 ).…”

A Quantitative Symbolic Approach to Individual Human Reasoning

“…The model theory with naive probabilities (Johnson-Laird, Legrenzi, Girotto, Legrenzi, & Caverni, 1999) provides a simple algorithm without using Bayes's theorem, for computing subjective probabilities and was further extended (Khemlani, Lotstein, & Johnson-Laird, 2015;Khemlani & Johnson-Laird, 2016). These two theories seem to have conflicting viewpoints (Oaksford & Chater, 2020;Knauff & Gazzo Castañeda, 2021;Oaksford, 2021;Over, 2021) and so far, there is no agreement on whether an integration is possible (López-Astorga et al, 2021;Over, 2021).…”