Author(s): Lucia E. Faiciuc / Language(s): English
/ Issue: 15/2017
In the psychometric instruments that measure cognitive aptitudes like general intelligence, logical thinking, or formal reasoning, there are included, sometimes, some few categorical syllogisms, but why those particular syllogisms are selected is not very clear. On the other hand, in the empirical studies in which the theoretical models of the categorical syllogistic reasoning are tested, there are used syllogistic tasks in which tens of categorical syllogisms are included, as many as possible from the total number of 64 possible syllogisms (for the case in which only the two premises of a syllogism are taken into consideration). From pragmatic reasons (for example, administration time of a psychometric instrument), it would be desirable that, from those syllogistic tasks with a high number of categorical syllogisms to be selected for a psychometric purpose a small number of categorical syllogisms that have the highest potential to discriminate between the persons with a high ability for categorical syllogistic reasoning and the ones with a low ability in this respect, providing a more solid empirical base for the choice of the categorical syllogisms included in the cognitive tests. The present research is intended to be a contribution in that direction, an undertaking that, to my knowledge, lacks from the psychological literature. The research was based on the data obtained by me in a yet unpublished series of empirical studies, on a total number of 323 participants, having the same experimental design, through which there were investigated the cognitive processes involved in the syllogistic reasoning. In those studies, a syllogistic task with 24 categorical syllogisms with an abstract symbolic content, with two versions with a different linguistic format was used. In this research, from these 24 categorical syllogisms, there were selected a small number of syllogisms (five) as having the highest discriminative potential, based on the way they were solved by two groups of participants taken out from the entire sample as having the highest, and, respectively, the lowest stable performance at this syllogistic task in its two versions. The majority of the selected syllogisms (three) were invalid ones, with two negative premises. Future studies are needed in order to investigate the measure in which the selected categorical syllogisms have indeed a predictive value for the ability to reason syllogistically, in particular, or even for the formal thinking, or for intelligence, in general.
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