Reasoning in schizophrenia. Review and analysis from the cognitive perspective

A long tradition of research on schizophrenia has considered defects in logical reasoning one of the core features of this mental disorder. According to this view, reasoning in schizophrenia is severely impaired. Nevertheless, an increasing amount of data coming from the cognitive perspective is making this conclusion more controversial, and seems to be heading in the same direction as a very different kind of tradition, that of psychiatric phenomenology. This approach considers the typical features of schizophrenia in terms of an enhancement of logic, rather than a defect of it (cf. Minkowski 1927, Binswanger 1956, Blankenburg 1971). In this paper, we will bring together these two different perspectives in order to explain why the “lack of logic” paradigm seems to fail to understand schizophrenics’ reasoning abilities.