Identifying Intelligence - Natural and Artificial Reasoning - page 27

Fig. 3.1 Intelligence
stimulating action

Action

Validation
Action Destination

Intelligence

Information
Source

Inferred
Message

Hypothesis

Interpretation

Message

often the consequence of a process involving intelligence in normal daily situations;
after all, that seems to be the main purpose of intelligence. The overall sequence is
shown in the reproduced diagram from Chap. 1 in Fig. 3.1 . The detailed intelligence
process of insight and reason is also reproduced in Fig. 3.2 .
The diagram Fig. 3.2 shows a feedback loop as the final result of insight followed
by reason. Johnson-Laird and Wason ( 1977 ) explored the nature of this feedback
loop in human problem solving, where an action is required based upon a given
insight.
In one of their tests:

“ ... you are presented with four cards showing, respectively:
'A' 'D' '4' '7'
and you know from previous experience that every card, of which these are a subset, has a
letter on one side and a number on the other side. You are then given this rule about the four
cards in front of you: “ If a card has a vowel on one side, then it has an even number on the
other side .”

So here the insight normally required by intelligence is already given.

Next you are told: “Your task is to say which of the cards you need to turn over in order to
find out whether the rule is true or false.”
Here the investigation is to see if you can determine the correct action to test the
validity of a given hypothesis.
The most frequent answers to test this concept are 'A and 4' and 'only A' (Wason
and Johnson-Laird 1968 ). Both these answers are logically wrong. The correct formal
answer is 'A and 7' . This is because the rule can be expressed as:

Vowel implies Even
This means that given a Vowel there will always be an Even number on the reverse
side but given an Even number there may or may not be a Vowel. This is because
'implies' is only logically consistent in one direction. This can be seen in a Table 3.1
in lines 1 and 3 for the condition YisEven is True .