Conditional reasoning with a point of view: The logic of perspective change

Is human domain specific reasoning illogical? The effect of perspective change on reasoning about social contracts is one of the puzzling phenomena known from research on Wason's selection task that seems to corroborate an affirmative answer to this question. Therefore, some authors postulated non-logical cognitive processes specialized for reasoning about social contracts. In contrast to this view, we argue that such effects reflect the influence of domain specific knowledge on logical reasoning. This knowledge must not be ignored when checking the deductive validity of subjects' inferences. Taking it into account sheds a new light on individuals' deductive competence. Further, it becomes possible to predict such effects not only for the domain of social contracts. We present a model of causal reasoning that allows us to derive new effects of perspective change, We argue that these effects do not show that people make illogical inferences but, on the contrary, that subjects validly reason deductively from their causal knowledge. Finally, we present empirical results that strongly support our arguments.