public accountability is a sign of modern and democratic administration. accountability has become a topic of concern in governance literature. the question of holding politicians and administration accountable in new governance environment, where many traditional means for controlling government have been no longer fully applied, has gained wide recognition. as a consequence, new types of acco...

This article begins with an account of logic, and of how logicians formulate formal rules of inference for the sentential calculus, which hinges on analogs of negation and the connectives if, or, and and. It considers the various ways in which computer scientists have written programs to prove the validity of inferences in this and other domains. Finally, it outlines the principal psychological...

The blocking effect in causal learning, once taken as a hallmark of associative learning, has recently been explained in terms of an explicit deductive reasoning process. Yet when the conditions necessary for deduction are removed, a small blocking effect is often still present. We examined the relationship between blocking and participants’ performance on analytical thinking and probabilistic ...

Deductive reasoning Deductive reasoning is reasoning from the general to the specific. It is what we colloquially think of as "logic". A deductive inference is a judgment or generalization based on axioms or assumptions. For example, if two coins are assumed perfectly balanced then one can conclude that the mean number of heads of tossing these two coins must be one. The deductive generalizatio...

There are currently increased efforts to make proof central to school mathematics throughout the grades. Yet, realizing this goal is not easy, as it requires that students master several abilities. In this article, we focus on one such ability, namely, the ability for deductive reasoning. We first offer a conceptualization of proof, which we use to delineate our focus on deductive reasoning. We...