Awareness of the ‘possible’ as a mediator of formal thinking in conditional reasoning problems

Abstract

This study attempted to test the hypothesis that formal reasoning on conditional logic problems of the form pr̊q is mediated by awareness of the existence and pertinence of possible relations of the form ar̊q. A paper‐and‐pencil test consisting of three conditional reasoning problems and a fourth question designed to measure subjects' awareness of alternate possibilities within the context of a given conditional relation was administered to 239 post‐secondary students. Of these subjects, 143 were also given an individual conditional reasoning test using an apparatus with visible and invisible trajectories. The results indicated that, while individual performance on the two tests varied greatly, it remained correlated with subjects' awareness of the ‘possible’. In addition, analysis of non‐formal responses produced in both tests indicated that certain of these could be reasonably categorized as intermediate or transitional responses between concrete and formal levels.