This study examined the influence of shape similarity and labels on 13-month-olds' inductive inferences. In 3 experiments, 123 infants were presented with novel target objects with or without a nonvisible property, followed by test objects that varied in shape similarity. When objects were not labeled, infants generalized the nonvisible property…

International evidence suggests that a "new enterprise logic" is emerging from efforts to achieve the transformation of schools, defined as significant, systematic, and sustained change that leads to high levels of achievement for all students in all settings. Traditional logic is turned on its head when the student is viewed as the key unit of…

Previous research has shown that rats increase their rate of responding for 1% sucrose reinforcement in the first half of the session if food-pellet, rather than 1% sucrose, reinforcement will be available in the second half (i.e., positive induction). Four experiments investigated whether this induction effect would be changed by altering the…

While exploring the subject of geometric proofs, boolean logic operators AND and OR can be used to allow students to visualize their true-or-false patterns. An activity in the form of constructing electrical circuits is illustrated to explain the concept.

The commentaries by Feldman and Leenaars are less than persuasive, insofar as they are grounded in an arbitrary and potentially inappropriate advocacy of communal rather than individual values; in unproven assumptions about the constricted and illogical reasoning of suicidal persons; in an implicit equation of their acts with "sins"; and/or in a…

William Harvey's discovery of the presence of capillaries and the role played by them without actually seeing them highlights his power of observation and logic. However, his perspective could not be considered as new since he had adopted his disposition for ocular demonstration from Aristotle and Galen.

This article provides an account of a "neo-Aristotelian" conception of practice. It introduces this account through an analysis of internal and external goods of practices. It then delineates a crucial distinction between practical and technical rationality and grounds this distinction in an analysis of the priority of "material" over "method" in…

Johnson-Laird and coworkers' Mental Model theory of propositional reasoning is shown to be somewhere in between what logicians have defined as "credulous" and "skeptical" with respect to the conclusions it draws on default reasoning problems. It is then argued that in situations where skeptical reasoning has been shown to lead to problematic…

Modern logic provides accounts of both interpretation and derivation which work together to provide abstract frameworks for modelling the sensitivity of human reasoning to task, context and content. Cognitive theories have underplayed the importance of interpretative processes. We illustrate, using Wason's [Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 20 (1968) 273]…

William Playfair's pie chart is more than 200 years old and yet its intellectual origins remain obscure. The inspiration likely derived from the logic diagrams of Llull, Bruno, Leibniz, and Euler, which were familiar to William because of the instruction of his mathematician brother John. The pie chart is broadly popular but--despite its common…

This paper comments on the article "Psychology and Phenomenology: A Clarification" by H. H. Kendler. In this article, Kendler sought to resolve the methodological issue that divides much of contemporary psychology--namely, the difference between natural science and human science in their respective views of psychological life. Whereas Kendler…

Current evidence appoints a central role to cholinergic interneurons in modulating striatal function. Recently, a long-term potentiation (LTP) of synaptic transmission has been reported to occur in these neurons. The relationship between the pattern of cortico/thalamostriatal fibers stimulation, the consequent changes in the intracellular calcium…

Grounded theory's popularity persists after three decades of broad-ranging critique. In this article three problematic notions are discussed--"theory," "ground" and "discovery"--which linger in the continuing use and development of grounded theory procedures. It is argued that far from providing the epistemic security promised by grounded theory,…

This study compares transfer performed by subjects trained to solve verbal analogies, with transfer by subjects trained to construct them. The first group (n = 57) received instruction in a strategy to solve verbal analogies and the second group (n = 66) was trained in strategies for constructing such analogies. Before and after intervention, all…

Many difficulties surrounding mathematical induction have been described by researchers. In this paper, I describe several underlying causes for these difficulties. In particular, the symbolic nature of induction is discussed, along with student cognitive levels, validation abilities, and proof schemes.