The empirical case for two systems of reasoning.

Abstract

Distinctions have been proposed between systems of reasoning for centuries. This article distills properties shared by many of these distinctions and characterizes the resulting systems in light of recent findings and theoretical developments. One system is associative because its computations reflect similarity structure and relations of temporal contiguity. The other is rule based because it operates on symbolic structures that have logical content and variables and because its computations have the properties that are normally assigned to rules. The systems serve complementary functions and can simultaneously generate different solutions to a reasoning problem. The rule-based system can suppress the associative system but not completely inhibit it. The article reviews evidence in favor of the distinction and its characterization. One of the oldest conundrums in psychology is whether people are best conceived as parallel processors of information who operate along diffuse associative links or as analysts who operate by deliberate and sequential manipulation of internal representations. Are inferences drawn through a network of learned associative pathways or through application of a kind ofpsychologic that manipulates symbolic tokens in a rule-governed way? The debate has raged (again) in cognitive psychology for almost a decade now. It has pitted those who prefer models of mental phenomena to be built out of networks of associative devices that pass activation around in parallel and distributed form (the way brains probably function) against those who prefer models built out of formal languages in which symbols are composed into sentences that are processed sequentially (the way computers function). An obvious solution to the conundrum is to conceive of the