The questionable utility of “cognitive ability” in explaining cognitive illusions

The notion of “cognitive ability” leads to paradoxical conclusions when invoked to explain Inhelder and Piaget's research on class inclusion reasoning and research on the inclusion rule in the heuristics-and-biases program. The vague distinction between associative and rule-based reasoning overlooks the human capacity for semantic and pragmatic inferences, and consequently, makes intelligent inferences look like reasoning errors.