Threats may be negative promises (but warnings are more than negative tips)

In everyday situations conditional promises, threats, tips, and warnings are commonplace. Previous research has reported disruption to eye movements during reading when conditional promises are produced by someone who does not have control over the conditional outcome event, but no such disruption for the processing of conditional tips. In the present paper, we examine how readers process conditional threats and warnings. We compare one account which views conditional threats and warnings simply as promises and tips with negative outcomes, with an alternative account which highlights their broader pragmatic differences. In an eye-tracking experiment we find evidence suggesting that, in processing terms, while threats operate like negative promises, warnings are more than negative tips.     

Conditional probability and components of rt in the variable foreperiod experiment

If the passage of time during the foreperiod in a variable foreperiod experiment is marked by a series of tones, RT decreases with the conditional probability of stimulus occurrence. RTs at short foreperiods, however, are rather slower than would be expected on the basis of a simple conditional probability effect. It is suggested that this is attributable to an independent “initial slow reaction” effect, and it is shown that the degree of this effect is influenced by the duration of the prior foreperiod. The results are related to those of variable foreperiod a-reactions in which no conditional probability effect has been found, and it is argued that in a marked reaction of the kind described above, the initial slow reaction effect behaves like an a-reaction component of RT. It is suggested that the absence of a conditional probability effect in the a-reaction and its presence in the marked reaction are related to the fact that a different type of sensory process is used to identify the signal in each case.     

A theory of permission based on the notion of derogation

This paper presents a unifying theory of permission that integrates the concept of negative permission with three concepts of positive permission, namely explicit permission, exemption and antithetic permission. The concepts are defined and logically related by paying particular attention to the system of which they form part. A simple procedure for calculating the permitted actions that can be said to be implicit in a code of norms or a policy specification is then given.     

Defining Moments: Catalysts for Professional Development

In this series of papers, 17 genetic counselors describe defining moments, that is, personal experiences or events that led to a further realization of themselves as genetic counselors. These experiences, both positive and negative, describe a significant impact on the authors' professional growth and development. A call for papers was issued through the National Society of Genetic Counselors listserv and through the Journal of Genetic Counseling in 2001. This call resulted in the following 15 papers in which the authors were asked to describe the nature of a defining moment and how it affected their professional identity and practice. The authors provided an account of the experience or event, what it was about the experience that made it a defining moment, how it affected them personally and professionally, and if a defining moment was negative, how they were able to derive positive outcomes. Implications of these defining moments for other genetic counselors are discussed in a concluding paper.     

Policy Externalism

I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non‐doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best explanation of some strange ways we use certain conditionals. The main thought throughout is that attitudes we reason with, like belief, are very different from attitudes we don't reason with, in a way that constrains the former but not the latter. Finally, I investigate some consequences of policy externalism, including that it secures the possibility of genuine conditional apologies.     

Pragmatic Schemas and the Selection Task: To Reason or Not to Reason

Cheng and Holyoak (1985) have proposed that people possess classes of linguistically based schemas that have an internal structure that is determined by pragmatic considerations. They found that when permission schemas (“If you want to do P, then you must do Q”) are used in the selection task, the success rate is much superior to what is usually observed. According to Cheng and Holyoak, this is due to the fact that the permission schema is defined by a set of production rules that give the same answers to problems of conditional inference as those of formal logic. In order to test this hypothesis specifically, 160 university students were given one of two tests. The first contained two sets of inferential reasoning tasks, one using a permission schema, the second using a relation of multiple causality. The second test employed the same two conditional relations, but in an appropriate context. The results indicated that subjects did better on the reasoning task with the schema of multiple causality when presented in context, but, as predicted, their performance was much worse on the inferential reasoning task with the permission schema, which generated a higher proportion of logically incorrect responses. These results suggest that contrary to what has been affirmed, permission schemas might not have a logical structure that is equivalent to conditional logic. A second experiment examined selection task performance using the same two relations in context. Performance on the permission schema was superior to that found with the relation of multiple causality. This confirmed previous results indicating that permission schemas do improve selection task performance, but also suggests that this effect is not related to understanding of conditional reasoning.     

Pragmatic reasoning schemas

We propose that people typically reason about realistic situations using neither content-free syntactic inference rules nor representations of specific experiences. Rather, people reason using knowledge structures that we term pragmatic reasoning schemas, which are generalized sets of rules defined in relation to classes of goals. Three experiments examined the impact of a “permission schema” on deductive reasoning. Experiment 1 demonstrated that by evoking the permission schema it is possible to facilitate performance in Wason's selection paradigm for subjects who have had no experience with the specific content of the problems. Experiment 2 showed that a selection problem worded in terms of an abstract permission elicited better performance than one worded in terms of a concrete but arbitrary situation, providing evidence for an abstract permission schema that is free of domain-specific content. Experiment 3 provided evidence that evocation of a permission schema affects not only tasks requiring procedural knowledge, but also a linguistic rephrasing task requiring declarative knowledge. In particular, statements in the form if p then q were rephrased into the form p only if q with greater frequency for permission than for arbitrary statements, and rephrasings of permission statements produced a pattern of introduction of modals (must, can) totally unlike that observed for arbitrary conditional statements. Other pragmatic schemas, such as “causal” and “evidence” schemas can account for both linguistic and reasoning phenomena that alternative hypotheses fail to explain.     

Conditions for the acceptance of deontic conditionals.

Recent psychological research has investigated how people assess the probability of an indicative conditional. Most people give the conditional probability of q given p as the probability of if p then q. Asking about the probability of an indicative conditional, one is in effect asking about its acceptability. But on what basis are deontic conditionals judged to be acceptable or unacceptable? Using a decision theoretic analysis, we argue that a deontic conditional, of the form if p then must q or if p then may q, will be judged acceptable to the extent that the p & q possibility is preferred to the p & not-q possibility. Two experiments are reported in which this prediction was upheld. There was also evidence that the pragmatic suitability of permission rules is partly determined by evaluations of the not-p & q possibility. Implications of these results for theories of deontic reasoning are discussed.     

Free Choice Permission is Strong Permission

Free choice permission, a crucial test case concerning the semantics/ pragmatics boundary, usually receives a pragmatic treatment. But its pragmatic features follow from its semantics. We observe that free choice inferences are defeasible, and defend a semantics of free choice permission as strong permission expressed in terms of a modal conditional in a nonmonotonic logic.     

Conditional discrimination and equivalence relations: A theoretical analysis of control by negative stimuli

A detailed analysis is presented of the ways in which control by the negative stimulus in two-comparison conditional discriminations may be expected to affect the outcome of tests for the properties of equivalence relations. Control by the negative stimulus should produce the following results: (a) no observable effect on symmetry tests; (b) reflexivity test results should look like “oddity” rather than “identity”; and (c) transitivity tests that involve an odd number of nodes should yield results that are 100% opposite to tests that involve an even number of nodes. The analysis also considers the effects of variation in the type of comparison-stimulus control between and within baseline conditional discriminations. Methods are suggested for experimentally regulating the type of control, and for verifying the predictions that the analysis generates. If suggested experiments continue to support the analysis, investigators who use two-comparison conditional discriminations to study equivalence relations will either have to control explicitly whether the positive or the negative comparison governs their subjects' choices, or they will have to abandon two comparisons and use three or more comparisons instead.     

Conditional permission in deontic logic

Conclusion In the face of the considerations set forth above, I submit that Anderson's proposed definition (D) does not represent an acceptable construction of the concept of conditional permission. This, in turn, suggests that conditional permission must be viewed as a viable deontic relationship in its own right, and is not definable in terms of unconditional deontic concepts. It appears, then, that a reduction of conditional to unconditional deontic logic is not warranted.     

Hey Little Sister,Who's the Only One? Modulating Informativeness in the Resolution of Privative Ambiguity

We present two eye‐tracking experiments on the interpretation of sentences like “The tall girl is (not) the only one that …,” which are ambiguous between the anaphoric (the only girl that …) and the exophoric interpretation (the only individual that …). These interpretations differ in informativeness: in a positive context, the exophoric (strong) reading entails the anaphoric (weak), while in a negative context the entailment pattern is reversed and the anaphoric reading is the strongest one. We tested whether adults rely on considerations about informativeness in solving the ambiguity. The results show that participants interpreted one exophorically in both positive and negative contexts. Given these findings, we cast doubts on the idea that Informativeness plays a role in ambiguity resolution and proposes a Principle of Maximal Exploitation: When a context is provided, adults extend their domain of evaluation to include the whole scenario, independently from truth‐conditional considerations about informativity and strength.     

Groups as gatekeepers to genomic research: conceptually confusing, morally hazardous, and practically useless

Some argue that human groups have a stake in the outcome of population-genomics research and that the decision to participate in such research should therefore be subject to group permission. It is not possible, however, to obtain prior group permission, because the actual human groups under study, human demes, are unidentifiable before research begins. Moreover, they lack moral standing. If identifiable social groups with moral standing are used as proxies for demes, group approval could be sought, but at the expense of unfairly exposing these surrogates to risks from which prior group approval is powerless to protect them. Unless population genomics can proceed without targeting socially defined groups, or can find other ways of protecting them, it may fall to individuals to protect the interests of the groups they care about, and to scientists to warn their subjects of the need to do so.     

Pragmatic schemas and conditional reasoning in children

Solving problems involving conditional relationships has been postulated to play a central role in the development of deductive reasoning, which itself underpins much cognitive developmental theory. The traditional Piagetian and “natural logic” approaches to this topic have more recently been challenged by findings that are more readily explained in terms of the concept of pragmatic schemas. On this basis it was predicted that even young “pre-formal” children would be able to succeed in a Reduced Array Selection Task if the test statement (referring to a previously told story about bees living in a hive) was couched in such a way as to evoke an authorization or permission schema. This proved to be the case in the present study involving 54 nine- and ten-year-old children: The permission condition elicited 70% globally correct solutions, compared to the 11% elicited by the formal control condition. Moreover, this facilitatory effect of the permission condition carried over to a second trial conducted in a standard way across all the conditions.     

Peirce: Underdetermination,Agnosticism, and Related Mistakes

There are two ways that we might respond to the underdetermination of theory by data. One response, which we can call the agnostic response, is to suspend judgment: “Where scientific standards cannot guide us, we should believe nothing”. Another response, which we can call the fideist response, is to believe whatever we would like to believe: “If science cannot speak to the question, then we may believe anything without science ever contradicting us”. C.S. Peirce recognized these options and suggested evading the dilemma. It is a Logical Maxim, he suggests, that there could be no genuine underdetermination. This is no longer a viable option in the wake of developments in modern physics, so we must face the dilemma head on. The agnostic and fideist responses to underdetermination represent fundamentally different epistemic viewpoints. Nevertheless, the choice between them is not an unresolvable struggle between incommensurable worldviews. There are legitimate considerations tugging in each direction. Given the balance of these considerations, there should be a modest presumption of agnosticism. This may conflict with Peirce's Logical Maxim, but it preserves all that we can preserve of the Peircean motivation.     

Social roles and utilities in reasoning with deontic conditionals

A set of experiments is reported in which a new formulation of deontic thinking is tested. This is that people represent subjective utilities inherent in conforming to or violating deontic statements, along with the social dynamics of these statements. The experiments used Wason's selection task and tested people's understanding of conditional permission. In the first two experiments, familiar scenarios referring to family interactions were used. In the third, an imaginary business content was used. In both cases it was apparent that people's thinking depended on their representation of the utilities associated with the agent of a permission statement (the party who lays down the rule) and the actor (the party whose behaviour is its target). The results are discussed as favouring an explanation in terms of mental models, rather than the schema theories which have dominated this field hitherto.     

Blame,desert and compatibilist capacity: a diachronic account of moderateness in regards to reasons-responsiveness

This paper argues that John Fischer and Mark Ravizza's compatibilist theory of moral responsibility cannot justify reactive attitudes like blame and desert-based practices like retributive punishment. The problem with their account, I argue, is that their analysis of moderateness in regards to reasons-responsiveness has the wrong normative features. However, I propose an alternative account of what it means for a mechanism to be moderately reasons-responsive which addresses this deficiency. In a nut shell, while Fischer and Ravizza test for moderate reasons-responsiveness by checking how a mechanism behaves in a given time slice across other possible worlds, on my account we should ask how that mechanism behaves in this world over a span of time – specifically, whether it responds to reasons sufficiently often. My diachronic account is intended as a drop-in replacement for Fischer and Ravizza's synchronic account.