Peter Wason

British cognitive psychologist (1924–2003) who devised the Wason selection task, the four-card conditional-reasoning experiment in which most people fail to pick the cards that could logically falsify an "if P then Q" rule — one of the most-replicated and most-argued-over results in the psychology of reasoning. The task, and the broader pattern of "irrational" conditional inference it exposed, is the empirical phenomenon that later formal rehabilitations compete to explain.

Wason matters to this vault as the fixed target both major non-classical accounts of human reasoning measure themselves against. The Bayesian / rational-analysis camp recasts his task as optimal data selection under uncertainty (claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection, entity-mike-oaksford, entity-nick-chater); the logic-programming camp recasts the same "fallacies" as closed-world, non-monotonic reasoning (claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-model-wason-fallacies-as-closed-world-reasoning, entity-keith-stenning, entity-michiel-van-lambalgen). Both say the reasoner was fine and the yardstick was wrong; they disagree on which yardstick to substitute.

References

• claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-model-wason-fallacies-as-closed-world-reasoning · claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-distinguish-reasoning-for-vs-from-an-interpretation · claim-stenning-van-lambalgen-two-clause-exception-scheme-not-material-conditional
• claim-oaksford-chater-recast-wason-task-as-optimal-data-selection · claim-conditional-reasoning-fallacies-as-closed-world-inference-in-asp · claim-logic-programming-account-rivals-probabilistic-account-of-conditional-reasoning