It is argued in cognitive psychology that mental operations are domain-specific which have been generally believed to be universal. Y. Saeki, a cognitive psychologist, who is one of the most enthusiastic propagandists of this idea in Japan, gives three groups of evidences purporting to support domain-specificity of mental operations, namely, recent cross-cultural researches, context effect on Piaget's tasks and experimental studies on hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Since the first two groups of evidences had already been examined in the preceding article (Nakagaki 1992a), the third group of evidences and the productivity of this idea were examined in this article. For this purpose, thematic effects on Wason's four-card problem were analyzed, which Saeki interprets as an evidence for domain specificity of mental operations. A structural analysis of D'Andrade's Task (a thematic four-card problem) showed that a high performance of the task is not caused by introduction of a thematic contex per se, but by change in quality of the task and that, therefore, so-called "facilitation of hypothetico-deductive reasoning" is more apparent than real. Based on this analysis and those of the preceding article, it was concluded that three groups of evidences given by Saeki show domain-generality of mental operations rather than support the idea of domain-specificity and that this idea is unproductive in the sense that it obscures true problems and evades true explanations of such phenomena as thematic effects, contex effects, familiarity effects etc.
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