Why and How Diagrams Help in TeachingSyllogistic Skills: AnEmbodied Account

Teaching syllogistic reasoning is oftenperceived as teaching pupils the purely formal rules of deductive inference. According to this common conception, such reasoning is a highly abstract skill, one that is carried out by the processing of syntactically encoded representations of the premises. This paper argues that syllogistic reasoning may, indeed, keep clear of the concrete contents of the premises, but is realized by askill that is less abstract than rule-following. It argues that reasoning iscontinuous with our other skills andis realized by our capacities to deal with spatial situations.This explains why the use of Venn diagrams, amuch-usedtechnique for evaluating syllogistic inferences,is effective: the spatial layout expressed by the diagrams directly activatesthe actual mechanism reasoners use. Teachers are thereforeright when they teach the use of such diagrams. This paper also argues that using tools that tap into our capacities to deal with a three-dimensional worldwill be even more effective andcorroborates this argument with an experiment in which three-dimensional Venn diagrams were used to trainhigh school pupils.