Results of two experiments support these hypotheses: 1) children tend to treat contradictions and tautologies as empirical statements, due to their nonempirical character, not merely to the logical words occurring in them; and 2) the ability to examine language objectively is necessary for the ability to correctly evaluate nonempirical statements.…

College students were asked to reason about the relative speeds of horses turning on a merry-go-round platform. Results revealed that, unlike field independent subjects, field dependent subjects failed to reason analytically. They were misled by perceptually salient aspects of the situation. They resisted accomodating to additional information.…

A propositional logic game which is a subtest of the new British intelligence scale was analyzed to determine the extent to which skills proper to a single Piagetian period, formal operations, were hierarchically ordered. Item response patterns from 60 14-year-olds were categorized by means of ordering theory, a boolean algebraic measurement…

A study explored the degree to which people can capture the meaning of logical terms, using mental imagery. It was then hypothesized that: (1) subjects generally would fail to express logical relationships accurately, and (2) abstract images would be more difficult to capture than would concrete ones. Subjects, 25 college students, were asked to…

The distinction between inductive and deductive forms of argument, as proposed by G. W. Ziegelmueller and C. A. Dause, is the focus of this paper. The first part of the paper reviews several grounds for distinguishing induction from deduction and explains that neither the traditional distinctions--those based on particular or universal premises,…

Outlines two models of the curriculum based on assumptions about the mind, intelligence, and thought; and examines the concept of "thinking." (Author/PG)

A discussion of the argumentation fallacy of appeals to authority. (CH)

Regression analysis was used to investigate which selected structural and linguistic variables strongly influenced the relative difficulty of preservice elementary school teachers in judging simple deductive arguments. (JP)

Analyzes the relationship between the development of formal operations and the development of the adolescent personality, as hypothesized by Inhelder and Piaget. It is suggested that the concepts of possibility and reflectivity have a variety of meanings, and that once these meanings are examined, the logical foundation for the…

Studies of children's verbal reasoning that are focused on the valid principles of conditional reasoning indicate that young children (1) draw inferences from logically unconnected semantically related statements; (2) arrive at conclusions on the basis of no presented evidence; (3) do not differentiate between definite and indefinite propositions;…

The argumentative perspective enables rhetoric to function in a manner analagous to science or analytic philosophy, yielding reliable knowledge about nonempirical topics, which other methods cannot address. In short, argumentation is the equivalent of hypothesis-testing. Forensics should offer laboratory experience in developing this perspective…

Describes how commercial television techniques and formats were used in an instructional television program on logical fallacies in order to capture students' attention. (DD)

Explores the extent of dialectical operations within the decision making processes of older adults. (BD)