Componenti interpretative nei processi inferenziali

The systematic study of human reasoning began with the classical philosophers starting with Plato, but especially with Aristotle, the Megarics and the Stoics. Their interests were primarily normative, but by laying the foundations of the logical system, they believed that, at the same time, they would also understand the way human thought works. Since the full consistency of logic with human deductive reasoning had always been upheld, for the early psychologists the ultimate goal of their work was to identify the common criteria of inferential processes, because they were convinced that this would guarantee their correct performance in any field of application. After Frege's and Russell's revolution in logicism, which banished any link between mathematical logic and natural thought, a gap became increasingly clear between the scholars of formal logic and the psychologists of reasoning, until, in 1966, Peter Cathcart Wason published the results of an experiment that shattered a certainty that had accompanied Western thought since the dawn of its philosophy. This experiment, known as the "Selection Task" (Wason, 1966), which has become one of the most important tests on deductive reasoning, marked the birth of a specific field of cognitive science, dedicated to the study of inferential processes, which is called "psychology of reasoning". This study will present a synthesis of the most significant moments of its birth and development, together with an overview of the cognitive theories on inferential processes for which the "Selection Task" has been a point of reference. Thus, the personalities, discoveries and critical aspects that make this discipline what it has become today will be brought together in a single philological narrative. This will be followed by the presentation of Keith Stenning and Michiel Van Lambalgen's research programme, which differs from other proposals in the psychology of reasoning because it focuses on the investigation of the interpretive processes involved in deductive processes and proposes a methodology, rather than a new theory, to obtain new standards of empirical analysis from the formal apparatus that contemporary logic has made available. Finally, the results of an experimental test in which various versions of the "Selection Task" were manipulated will be reported, in order to test the experimental results obtained by the authors and to verify the possibility of alleviating in the participants further interpretative difficulties identified by the authors.