Reasoning and Conceptual Understanding

As impressive as our human capacity for language is, it would be of very little use without our even more extraordinary ability to reason, to draw inferences and to reach conclusions that ‘go beyond the information given’ as Jerome Bruner (1975c) puts it. This ability to analyse the implications of what we know, to extrapolate and to draw conclusions from a few facts and so to discover new ideas, is the foundation of all our human knowledge, from the complexities of science and technology to the speculations of philosophy and religion. And even from early childhood, it’s at the root of our everyday understanding of the world, our everyday intelligence, as the examples in Box 6.1 show.