The inferential reasoning account of causal learning holds that effortful reasoning processes underpin causal judgments. Evidence for this account comes from demonstrations that performance on cue competition tasks is affected by pretraining showing causal cues to be additive in their effects. If inferential reasoning underpins the additivity effect, then we might expect this effect to emerge d...

The article investigates how 14to 15year-olds build informal conceptions of inferential statistics as they engage in a modelling process and build their own computer simulations with dynamic statistical software. This study proposes four primary phases of informal inferential reasoning for the students in the statistical modeling and simulation process. Findings show shifts in the conceptual st...

This paper discusses a case study of Sarah (aged 9;8-10;3) who is reported to have pragmatic difficulties. The focus is on her comprehension of questions, which are asked on the basis of pictures and heard stories. Particular focus is on the pragmatic (or inferential) demands of the input questions and their relationship to the (in)appropriacy of the answer. Data from 16 normally functioning 6-...

Informal inferential reasoning is a relatively recent concept in the research literature. Several research studies have defined this type of cognitive process in slightly different ways. In this paper, a working definition of informal inferential reasoning based on an analysis of the key aspects of statistical inference, and on research from educational psychology, science education, and mathem...

Valid, prior-free, and situation-specific probabilistic inference is desirable for serious uncertain inference, especially in bio-medical statistics. This chapter∗ introduces such an inferential system, called the Inferential Model (IM) framework, proposed recently. IMs do not require a prior to be specified, yet they produce probabilistic inferential results that have desireable frequency prop...

In a recent paper James Bogen and James Woodward denounce a set of views on confirmation that they collectively brand ‘IRS’. The supporters of these views cast confirmation in terms of Inferential Relations between observational and theoretical Sentences. Against IRS accounts of confirmation, Bogen and Woodward unveil two main objections: (a) inferential relations are not necessary to model con...