The initial representation in reasoning towards an interpretation of conditional sentences

All accounts of human reasoning (whether presented at the symbolic or subsymbolic level) have to reckon with the temporal organization of the human processing systems and the ephemeral nature of the representations it uses. We present three new empirical tests for the hypothesis that people commence the interpretational process by constructing a minimal initial representation. In the case of if A then C the initial representation captures the occurrence of the consequent, C, within the context of the antecedent, A. Conditional inference problems are created by a categorical premise that affirms or denies A or C. The initial representation allows an inference when the explicitly represented information matches (e.g., the categorical premise A affirms the antecedent “A”) but not when it mismatches (e.g., “not-A” denies A). Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed that people tend to accept the conclusion that “nothing follows” for the denial problems, as indeed they do not have a determinate initial-model conclusion. Experiment 3 demonstrated the other way round that the effect of problem type (affirmation versus denial) is reduced when we impede the possibility of inferring a determinate conclusion on the basis of the initial representation of both the affirmation and the denial problems.     

Priming effect in affirmative complex conditional connectives

We report the results of an experiment that examined the mental representations underlying the comprehension of complex conditional connectives (such as “A, on condition that B”) and the conditional if (such as “A, if B”). The mental representations during the comprehension stage were analysed using a “priming methodology”. The experiment showed that participants read the possibility “A and not-B” faster when it was primed by “A, if B” than when it was primed by “A, on condition that B”. The finding suggests that people understand the sentence “A, on condition that B” as biconditional; other possibilities (“A and B”, “not-A and B”, “not-A and not-B”) were primed equally by both connectives. We discuss the implications of this for current theories of reasoning.     

Making disjunctions exclusive

This work examines how people interpret the sentential connective “or”, which can be viewed either inclusively (A or B or both) or exclusively (A or B but not both). Following up on prior work concerning quantifiers (Bott & Noveck, 2004; Noveck, 2001; Noveck & Posada, 2003), which shows that the common pragmatic interpretation of “some”, some but not all, is conveyed as part of an effortful step, we investigate how extra effort applied to disjunctive statements leads to a pragmatic interpretation of “or”, or but not both. Experiment 1 compelled participants to wait for three seconds before answering, hence giving them the opportunity to process the utterance more deeply. Experiments 2 and 3 emphasized “or”, either by visual means (“OR”) or by prosodic means (contrastive stress) as another way to encourage participants to apply more effort. Following a relevance-theoretic line of argument, we hypothesized that conditions encouraging more processing effort would give rise to more pragmatic inferences and hence to more exclusive interpretations of the disjunction. This prediction was confirmed in the three experiments.     

People think about what is true for conditionals,not what is false: Only true possibilities prime the comprehension of “if”

We report the results of two priming experiments that examine the comprehension of conditionals—for example, “if there are apples then there are oranges”—and biconditionals—for example, “if and only if there are apples then there are oranges”. The first experiment showed that participants read a biconditional faster when it was primed by a true possibility, “there were apples and there were oranges” than when it was primed by a false possibility, “there were no apples and there were oranges”; a conditional was primed equally by both possibilities. The second experiment showed that participants read the negated-antecedent conjunction faster when it was primed by a conditional than when it was primed by a biconditional; the affirmative conjunction was primed equally by both connectives. The experiments show that (a) when people understand “if A then B”, they access the true possibilities, “A and B”, and “not-A and B”, and (b) when they understand “if and only if A then B” they access “A and B”, but they do not access “not-A and B”. We discuss their implications for current theories of reasoning.     

On the self-undermining functionality critique of morality

Nietzsche's injunction to examine “the value of values” can be heard in a pragmatic key, as inviting us to consider not whether certain values are true, but what they do for us. This oddly neglected pragmatic approach to Nietzsche now receives authoritative support from Bernard Reginster's new book, which offers a compelling and notably cohesive interpretation of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality. In this essay, I reconstruct Reginster's account of Nietzsche's critique of morality as a “self-undermining functionality critique” and raise three problems for it: (i) Is there room within an etiological conception of function for the notion of self-undermining functionality? (ii) If Nietzsche's critique is internal and based solely on the function it ascribes to morality, where does that critique derive its normative significance from? (iii) Does Reginster's account not make out ascetic morality to be more universally dysfunctional than it is, given that some priestly types have done remarkably well out of morality?     

Was Life Better in the “Good Old Days”? Intertemporal Judgments of Life Satisfaction

Intertemporal judgments are paired comparisons between the present time and some other time (e.g. “How satisfied are you with your life these days compared to five years ago?”). These judgments can provide evidence on the question, “Is life satisfaction in developed nations increasing, decreasing, or remaining constant?” This paper provides the first review of intertemporal judgments of life satisfaction, and reports a meta-analysis of 71 such studies from 9 developed countries. Results show that in every survey that asks people how happy their own lives are now compared to some past time, a majority says they are happier now than in the past. The meta-analysis also shows that this question must be carefully distinguished from asking about quality of life of the average person, which shows a majority believing that life was better for the “average person” in the past. These two beliefs are logically inconsistent, since the average respondent actually says their satisfaction is higher now. We consider several sources of bias that may influence these results, including cognitive processing heuristics, self-appraisal (desirability) bias, and information bias in media news.     

A generalization of comparative probability on finite sets

Let ? be a binary relation on a finite algebra $\text{A}$ of events A, B,…, where A ? B is interpreted as “A is more probable than B.” Conventional subjective probability is concerned with the existence of a probability measure P on $\text{A}$ that agrees with ? in the sense that A ? B ? P(A) > P(B). Because evidence suggests that some people's comparative probability judgments do not admit an agreeing probability measure, this paper explores a more flexible scheme for representing ? numerically. The new representation has A ? B ? p(A, B) > 0, where p is a monotonic and normalized skew-symmetric function on $\text{A}$ × $\text{A}$ that replaces P's additivity by a conditional additivity property. Conditional additivity says that $\text{p(A ? B, C) + p(?, C) = p(A, C) + p(B, C)}$ whenever A and B are disjoint. The paper examines consequences of this representation, presents examples of ? that it accommodates but which violate the conventional representation, formulates axioms for ? on $\text{A}$ that are necessary and sufficient for the representation, and discusses specializations in which p in separable in its arguments.     

La fonction argumentative des marques de la langue

The present paper reports a set of experimental studies concerning the comprehension of French argumentative operators and connectives. The first part is a presentation of the theoretical framework, the methodological problems and some of the most general results. Experiments were carried out in the perspective of the linguistic theory of argumentation developed by Anscombre and Ducrot. According to this theory, a number of devices in language are mainly defined by their argumentation function, i.e. by the types of discursive sequences and conclusions they involve. Three categories of such devices were examined: (1) operators like “presque” (almost), “à peine” (hardly), “au moins” (at least), etc. which give an argumentative orientation to the statement; (2) co-orientation connectives, like “même” (even), which relate two statements oriented towards the same conclusion; (3) counter-orientation connectives, like the concessive ones (“mais” (but), “quand même” (even so), etc.), which relate two statements oriented towards opposite conclusions. The data shed light on issues such as: What is the nature of the relationship between the informative and argumentative functions of different operators? Is there a hierarchical relation between the argumentative processes of “co-orientation” and “counter-orientation”? What is the role of negation in the processing of argumentative sequences? The second part of the paper focuses specifically on the study of how 8 and 10 year-old children process “counter-oriented” statements. Five concessive connectives were studied: “mais”, “pourtant”, “quand même”, “même si”, “bien que”. The test was composed of two successive completion tasks: in one task the children had to choose the relevant context of complex sentences involving concessive connectives; in the other task they had to choose their relevant conclusion. Main results show a clear evolution in the performance of children between 8 and 10, suggesting that concessive strategies are not completely mastered at the age of 8. Differences among the concessive connectives studied were brought out: the item “quand même” obtained much better results than the other items with 8-year-old subjects; statements with “mais” seemed to be better processed in the conclusion task than in the context task, especially by 10-year-old subjects. These results are compared with other data obtained in some of the numerous studies on the production and comprehension of concessive connectives in various languages, and discussed from the point of view of argumentative theory.     

Inherent directionality of “even if” counterfactual conditionals

In this research, we investigate whether semifactual conditionals such as “even if there had been an A, there would have been a B” are understood by thinking initially of the antecedent “A”, as was found with factual conditionals. The “inherent directionality” hypothesis assumes that for the comprehension of most relational statements, a presuppositional element (i.e. the “relatum”) is initially established. For “even if”, both terms could work as “relatum”. This is because on the one hand, people tend to infer “B” from “A” and “not-A” and, on the other hand, “B” could work as a pragmatic presupposition. In the present experiment, semifactual and factual conditionals were tested with a sentence-picture verification task. Results were consistent with the “inherent directionality” hypothesis: only “if then” factual conditionals, but not semifactuals, showed a preference for reasoning from the antecedent, with faster verifications.     

The weirdness of belief in free will

It has been argued that belief in free will is socially consequential and psychologically universal. In this paper we look at the folk concept of free will and its critical assessment in the context of recent psychological research. Is there a widespread consensus about the conceptual content of free will? We compared English “free will” with its lexical equivalents in Lithuanian, Hindi, Chinese and Mongolian languages and found that unlike Lithuanian, Chinese, Hindi and Mongolian lexical expressions of “free will” do not refer to the same concept free will. What kind people have been studied so far? A review of papers indicate that, overall, 91% of participants in studies on belief in free will were WEIRD. Thus, given that free will has no cross-culturally universal conceptual content and that most of the reviewed studies were based on WEIRD samples, belief in free will is not a psychological universal.     

A Normative Pragmatic Perspective on Appealing to Emotions in Argumentation

Is appealing to emotions in argumentation ever legitimate and, if so, what is the best way to analyze and evaluate such appeals? After overviewing a normative pragmatic perspective on appealing to emotions in argumentation, I present answers to these questions from pragma-dialectical, informal logical, and rhetorical perspectives, and note positions shared and supplemented by a normative pragmatic perspective. A normative pragmatic perspective holds that appealing to emotions in argumentation may be relevant and non-manipulative; and that emotional appeals may be analyzed as strategies that create pragmatic reasons and assessed by the standard of formal propriety or reasonability under the circumstances. I illustrate the explanatory power of the perspective by analyzing and evaluating some argumentation from Frederick Douglass’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.” I conclude that a normative pragmatic perspective offers a more complete account of appealing to emotions in argumentation than a pragma-dialectial, informal logical, or rhetorical perspective alone, identifies a range of norms available to arguers, and explains why appealing to emotions may be legitimate in particular cases of argumentation.     

When to trust the data: Further investigations of system error in a scientific reasoning task

When evaluating experimental evidence, how do people deal with the possibility that some of the feedback is erroneous? The potential for error means that evidence evaluation must include decisions about when to “trust the data.” In this paper we present two studies that focus on subjects’ responses to erroneous feedback in a hypothesis testing situation—a variant of Wason’s (1960) 2–4–6 rule discovery task in which some feedback was subject tosystem error: “hits” were reported as “misses” and vice versa. Our results show that, in contrast to previous research, people are equally adept at identifying false negatives and false positives; further, successful subjects were less likely to use a positive test strategy (Klayman & Ha, 1987) than were unsuccessful subjects. Finally, although others have found that generating possible hypotheses prior to experimentation increases success and task efficiency, such a manipulation did little to mitigate the effects of system error.     

Is conscious perception gradual or dichotomous? A comparison of report methodologies during a visual task

In a recent article, [Sergent, C. &; Dehaene, S. (2004). Is consciousness a gradual phenomenon? Evidence for an all-or-none bifurcation during the attentional blink, Psychological Science, 15(11), 720–729] claim to give experimental support to the thesis that there is a clear transition between conscious and unconscious perception. This idea is opposed to theoretical arguments that we should think of conscious perception as a continuum of clarity, with e.g., fringe conscious states [Mangan, B. (2001). Sensation’s ghost—the non-sensory “fringe” of consciousness, Psyche, 7, 18]. In the experimental study described in this article, we find support for this opposite notion that we should have a parsimonious account of conscious perception. Our reported finding relates to the hypothesis that there is more than one perceptual threshold [Merikle, P.M., Smilek, D. &; Eastwood, J.D. (2001). Perception without awareness: perspectives from cognitive psychology, Cognition, 79, 115–134], but goes further to argue that there are different “levels” of conscious perception.     

Addressing confounding errors when using non-experimental, observational data to make causal claims

In their recent book, Is Inequality Bad for Our Health?, Daniels, Kennedy, and Kawachi claim that to “act justly in health policy, we must have knowledge about the causal pathways through which socioeconomic (and other) inequalities work to produce differential health outcomes.” One of the central problems with this approach is its dependency on “knowledge about the causal pathways.” A widely held belief is that the randomized clinical trial (RCT) is, and ought to be the “gold standard” of evaluating the causal efficacy of interventions. However, often the only data available are non-experimental, observational data. For such data, the necessary randomization is missing. Because the randomization is missing, it seems to follow that it is not possible to make epistemically warranted claims about the causal pathways. Although we are not sanguine about the difficulty in using observational data to make warranted causal claims, we are not as pessimistic as those who believe that the only warranted causal claims are claims based on data from (idealized) RCTs. We argue that careful, thoughtful study design, informed by expert knowledge, that incorporates propensity score matching methods in conjunction with instrumental variable analyses, provides the possibility of warranted causal claims using observational data.     

The psychiatrist in national emergency

But Jehoshaphat said, “Is there not here another prophet of the Lord whom we may inquire?” And Ahab, the king of Israel, said to Jehoshaphat, “There is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the Lord, Micaiah the son of Imlah, but I hate him for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil.” (1 Kings, Ch. 22)     

Arguing about definitions

What are the implications of taking seriously Chaïm Perelman's proposition that “definitions are rhetorical”? Efforts to find Real Definitions are dysfunctional to the extent they direct argumentation toward pseudo “is” claims and away from explicit “ought” claims about how words are to be used. Addressing definitional disputes explicitly as propositions ofought rather thanis could put on the agenda the pragmatic concerns of definitional choice that might otherwise remain tacit.