Martin Dimond Stewart Braine (June 3, 1926 – April 6, 1996) was a cognitive psychologist known for his research on the development of language and reasoning.
He was Professor of Psychology at New York University at the time of his death.
Braine was well known for his research on mental logic.
He theorized that people naturally make deductive inferences based on their knowledge of natural language terms like if, all, any, and not.
Such terms are understood through an intuitive logic that supports commonsense reasoning, but may also produce reasoning fallacies or errors.
This natural mental logic was viewed as distinct from the standard logic of mathematicians and philosophers in terms of the inferences it licensed.
In contrast to Philip Johnson-Laird and others who suggested that people rely on mental models as opposed to logic when reasoning, Braine took the position that people rely on both mental logic and mental models, with the former closely tied to processes of linguistic comprehension.Braine edited the volumes Categories and Processes in Language Acquisition by Yonata Levy and Izchak Schlesinger, and Mental Logic with David O'Brien.