The epistemic significance of valid inference

The traditional picture of logic takes it for granted that ??valid arguments have a fundamental epistemic significance??, but neither model theory nor traditional proof theory dealing with formal system has been able to give an account of this significance. Since valid arguments as usually understood do not in general have any epistemic significance, the problem is to explain how and why we can nevertheless use them sometimes to acquire knowledge. It is suggested that we should distinguish between arguments and acts of inferences and that we have to reconsider the latter notion to arrive at the desired explanation. More precisely, the notions should be developed so that the following relationship holds: one gets in possession of a ground for a conclusion by inferring it from premisses for which one already has grounds, provided that the inference in question is valid. The paper proposes explications of the concepts of ground and deductively valid inference so that this relationship holds as a conceptual truth. Logical validity of inference is seen as a special case of deductive validity, but does not add anything as far as epistemic significance is concerned??it resides already in the deductively valid inferences.     

Concessive and semifactual interpretations during reasoning with multiple conditionals

The present research evaluates how people integrate factual ‘if then’ and semifactual ‘even if’ conditional premises in an inference task. The theory of mental models establishes that semifactual statements are represented by two mental models with different epistemic status: ‘A & B’ is conjectured and ‘not-A & B’ is presupposed. However, following the principle of cognitive economy in tasks with a high working memory load such as reasoning with multiple conditionals, people could simplify the deduction process in two ways, by discarding: (a) the presupposed case and/or (b) the epistemic status information. In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, we evaluated each of these hypotheses. In Experiment 1, participants make inferences from two conditionals: two factual conditionals or one factual and one semifactual, with different representations. In Experiment 2, participants make inferences with a factual conditional followed by two different semifactual conditionals that share the same representations but differ in their epistemic status. Accuracy and latency data suggest that people think of both the conjectured and the presupposed situations, but do not codify the epistemic status of either when the task does not require it. The results are discussed through theoretical predictions about how people make inferences from different connected conditionals.     

The influence of information redundancy on probabilistic inferences

Information redundancy affects the accuracy of inference strategies. A simulation study illustrates that under high-information redundancy simple heuristics that rely on only the most important information are as accurate as strategies that integrate all available information, whereas under low redundancy integrating information becomes advantageous. Assuming that people exercise adaptive strategy selection, it is predicted that their inferences will more often be captured by simple heuristics that focus on part of the available information insituations ofhigh-information redundancy, especially when information search is costly. This prediction is confirmed in two experiments. The participants' task was to repeatedly infer which of two alternatives, described by several cues, had a higher criterion value. In the first experiment, simple heuristics predicted the inference process better under high-information redundancy than under low-information redundancy. In the second experiment, this result could be generalized to an inference situation in which participants had no prior opportunity to learn about the strategies' accuracies through outcome feedback. The results demonstrate that people are able to respond adaptively to different decision environments under various learning opportunities.     

The logic sense: exploring the role of executive functioning in belief and logic-based judgments

Abstract

The Default Interventionist account suggests that by default, we often generate belief-based responses when reasoning and find it difficult to draw the logical inference. Recent research, however, shows that in some instances belief judgments take longer, are more prone to error and are more affected by cognitive load. One interpretation is that some logical inferences are available automatically and require intervention in order to respond according to beliefs. In two experiments, we investigate the effortful nature of belief judgments and the automaticity of logical inferences by increasing the inhibitory demands of the task. Participants were instructed to judge conclusion validity, believability and either font colour or font style, to increase the number of competing responses. Results showed that conflict more strongly affects judgments of believability than validity and when inhibitory demands are increased, the validity of an argument impacts more on belief judgments. These findings align with the new Parallel Processing model of belief bias.     

Process Tracing as an Effective Epistemic Complement

In the last decades philosophers of science and social scientists promoted the view that knowledge of mechanisms might help causal inference considerably in the social sciences. Mechanisms, however, can only assist causal inference effectively if scientists have a means to identify them correctly. Some scholars suggested that process-tracing might be a helpful strategy in this respect. Shared criteria to assess its performance, however, are not available yet; furthermore, the criteria proposed so far tie the validity of process-tracing findings to the specific kind of evidence it uses. In this paper I shall propose a criterion to assess process-tracing performance in cases in which favorable epistemic circumstances do not occur and the existing criteria thus fail to apply. The criterion I propose does not double as a condition for validity. Rather, it aims to assess whether the mechanism process-tracing outlines constitutes admissible evidence for the hypothesis at hand. It will be argued that only if this requirement is fulfilled process-tracing can be used as an effective complement for causal inference.     

Simple mechanisms for gathering social information

Social contexts are notoriously complex, yet decisions are nevertheless made by using simple strategies. We argue that the concept of fast and frugal heuristics provides a promising framework for understanding how we gather social information to make decisions in social environments. That is, we assume that under limitations of time, energy, and computational resources people use cognitively based shortcuts that rely on information from social environments to solve different types of real problems. We review three successful applications of heuristics to the social arena. We first introduce some commonly faced social inference problems (e.g., selecting a mate or deciding whether to cooperate with someone) and then discuss how individuals can use simple strategies to solve such problems. For each problem, we consider how social environments are structured, and how we take advantage of this structure when using heuristics to make inferences and decisions.     

Bias in the Counseling Process: How to Recognize and Avoid It

Counselors' vulnerability to inferential bias during the counseling process may result in misdiagnosis and improper interventions. This article provides readers with information regarding inferential bias. The inferential biases discussed include (a) availability and representativeness heuristics; (b) fundamental attribution error; (c) anchoring, prior knowledge, and labeling; (d) confirmatory hypothesis testing; and (e) reconstructive memory. Each bias is described and illustrated through fictitious case vignettes, and suggestions concerning what precautions counselors may do to avoid each type of bias are presented.     

How communication goals determine when audience tuning biases memory

After tuning their message to suit their audience's attitude, communicators' own memories for the original information (e.g., a target person's behaviors) often reflect the biased view expressed in their message--producing an audience-congruent memory bias. Exploring the motivational circumstances of message production, the authors investigated whether this bias depends on the goals driving audience tuning. In 4 experiments, the memory bias was found to a greater extent when audience tuning served the creation of a shared reality than when it served alternative, nonshared reality goals (being polite toward a stigmatized-group audience; obtaining incentives; being entertaining; complying with a blatant demand). In addition, the authors found that these effects were mediated by the epistemic trust in the audience-congruent view but not by the rehearsal or accurate retrieval of the original input information, the ability to discriminate between the original and the message information, or a contrast away from extremely tuned messages. The central role of epistemic trust, a measure of the communicators' experience of shared reality, was supported in meta-analyses across the experiments.     

Facts and Possibilities: A Model‐Based Theory of Sentential Reasoning

This article presents a fundamental advance in the theory of mental models as an explanation of reasoning about facts, possibilities, and probabilities. It postulates that the meanings of compound assertions, such as conditionals (if) and disjunctions (or), unlike those in logic, refer to conjunctions of epistemic possibilities that hold in default of information to the contrary. Various factors such as general knowledge can modulate these interpretations. New information can always override sentential inferences; that is, reasoning in daily life is defeasible (or nonmonotonic). The theory is a dual process one: It distinguishes between intuitive inferences (based on system 1) and deliberative inferences (based on system 2). The article describes a computer implementation of the theory, including its two systems of reasoning, and it shows how the program simulates crucial predictions that evidence corroborates. It concludes with a discussion of how the theory contrasts with those based on logic or on probabilities.     

Infostorms

It has become a truism that we live in so‐called information societies where new information technologies have made information abundant. At the same time, information science has made us aware of many phenomena tied to the way we process information. This article explores a series of socio‐epistemic information phenomena resulting from processes that track truth imperfectly: pluralistic ignorance, informational cascades, and belief polarization. It then couples these phenomena with the hypothesis that modern information technologies may lead to their amplification so as to give rise to what are called “infostorms.” This points to the need for studying further the exact relations between information technologies and such infostorms, as well as the ways we may design technologies to avoid being misled away from what we have good reasons to believe.     

PUBLICATION BIAS: A CASE STUDY OF FOUR TEST VENDORS

This article has 2 goals. First, we discuss publication bias and explain why it presents a potential problem for industrial and organizational psychology. After reviewing the traditional failsafe N, or file drawer analysis, we introduce a more sophisticated method of publication bias analysis (trim and fill), which has been developed in the medical literature but is largely unfamiliar to industrial and organizational psychology researchers. Second, we demonstrate trim and fill by applying it to validity information reported in the technical manuals of 4 test vendors. In doing so, we assess the likelihood that criterion-related validity information provided by test publishers may overestimate test validity. In our analysis of 18 validity distributions, we found evidence of either no or minimal bias for 2 of the vendors' distributions and evidence of moderate-to-severe bias in at least 1 distribution from each of the other 2 vendors. In both cases in which publication bias was found, we noted instances in which the publishers tended to report only statistically significant correlations and that this practice was detected using publication bias methodology.     

Behavior identification as a mediator of dispositional inference.

According to Trope's (1986) 2-stage model, the use of situational information ("A was teased") to identify behavior ("A reacted aggressively") may result in subsequent dispositional inferences ("A is an aggressive person") that seem insensitive to situational information. Two determinants of the situational biasing effect on behavior identification were varied, namely, behavior ambiguity and order of situational and behavioral information. It was found that when behavior was ambiguous and preceded by situational information, the latter affected behavior identification but not dispositional inference; in contrast, when behavior was unambiguous or when it was followed by situational information, the latter affected dispositional inference but not behavior identification. Thus, the same conditions that allowed situational information to bias behavior identification also nullified the effect of situational information on dispositional inference.     

Witness Vetting: What Determines Detectives' Perceptions of Witness Credibility?

During the course of a criminal investigation witness vetting, a detective's process of determining the credibility and weight of witness information, can lead to errors in an investigation that can go virtually unchallenged. Witness confidence, opportunity to view, and type of information proffered were examined in relation to detective inferences about witness reliability, accuracy, and probable cause to arrest. Experiment 1 involved 39 sworn law enforcement officers, and experiment 2 involved 43 sworn law enforcement officers and 86 mock detectives. Participants viewed a digital recording depicting a witness describing a gas station robbery (Experiment 1) or a campus mugging (Experiment 2). Witness confidence and detectives' inferences about culprit information influenced the vetting process and lent credibility to a confident witness whose accuracy was objectively unknown. Furthermore, the evidence indicates that sworn law enforcement are comparable with untrained observers in their use of social inference cues (i.e. confidence) in determining witness credibility; however, social inference can be assuaged by the rational, rule‐governed, decision framework established for witness vetting. Social inference processes inherent in the detective‐witness dyad is influenced by legal procedures in vetting witness information. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A probabilistic contrast model of causal induction

Deviations from the predictions of covariational models of causal attribution have often been reported in the literature. These include a bias against using consensus information, a bias toward attributing effects to a person, and a tendency to make a variety of unpredicted conjunctive attributions. It is contended that these deviations, rather than representing irrational biases, could be due to (a) unspecified information over which causal inferences are computed and (b) the questionable normativeness of the models against which these deviations have been measured. A probabilistic extension of Kelley's analysis-of-variance analogy is proposed. An experiment was performed to assess the above biases and evaluate the proposed model against competing ones. The results indicate that the inference process is unbiased.     

Active inference, sensory attenuation and illusions

Active inference provides a simple and neurobiologically plausible account of how action and perception are coupled in producing (Bayes) optimal behaviour. This can be seen most easily as minimising prediction error: we can either change our predictions to explain sensory input through perception. Alternatively, we can actively change sensory input to fulfil our predictions. In active inference, this action is mediated by classical reflex arcs that minimise proprioceptive prediction error created by descending proprioceptive predictions. However, this creates a conflict between action and perception; in that, self-generated movements require predictions to override the sensory evidence that one is not actually moving. However, ignoring sensory evidence means that externally generated sensations will not be perceived. Conversely, attending to (proprioceptive and somatosensory) sensations enables the detection of externally generated events but precludes generation of actions. This conflict can be resolved by attenuating the precision of sensory evidence during movement or, equivalently, attending away from the consequences of self-made acts. We propose that this Bayes optimal withdrawal of precise sensory evidence during movement is the cause of psychophysical sensory attenuation. Furthermore, it explains the force-matching illusion and reproduces empirical results almost exactly. Finally, if attenuation is removed, the force-matching illusion disappears and false (delusional) inferences about agency emerge. This is important, given the negative correlation between sensory attenuation and delusional beliefs in normal subjects—and the reduction in the magnitude of the illusion in schizophrenia. Active inference therefore links the neuromodulatory optimisation of precision to sensory attenuation and illusory phenomena during the attribution of agency in normal subjects. It also provides a functional account of deficits in syndromes characterised by false inference and impaired movement—like schizophrenia and Parkinsonism—syndromes that implicate abnormal modulatory neurotransmission.     

Dispositional attribution: multiple inferences about motive-related traits

This research views dispositional inference as a process whereby perceivers integrate multiple inferences about a target person's motives and traits. The findings suggest that although perceived motives may stimulate extra attributional processing (S. Fein, 1996), the content of the inferred motive is important as well. Perceivers learned about situational forces implying that a target person had free choice, no choice, or an ulterior motive for helpful behavior. Inferences about the target's helpfulness differed depending on whether the target's behavior was attributed to an obedience motive (no-choice condition) or to a selfish motive (ulterior-motive condition). In general, inferences about motives were more predictive of dispositional inferences than were global causal attributions (to situational vs. dispositional forces) or base rate assumptions.     

Implicational schemata and the correspondence bias: on the diagnostic value of situationally constrained behavior

Drawing on G. D. Reeder's (1993) schematic model of dispositional inference, it is hypothesized that perceivers' tendency to draw correspondent dispositional inferences from situationally constrained behavior (i.e., the correspondence bias) can be due to the application of schematic assumptions about trait-behavior relations (i.e., implicational schemata) within the process of situational adjustment. Applied to attitude attribution, situational adjustment is hypothesized to follow an implicit theory of ability, implying that only authors with a corresponding attitude are able to write a persuasive essay toward a given position. Results from 6 experiments offer converging evidence for this hypothesis. Implications for a sufficient understanding of the processes that lead to the correspondence bias are discussed.     

The role of logical and nonlogical factors in making inferences about category membership

Three postulates are proposed concerning the manner in which persons infer the validity of propositions that do not necessarily follow logically from the information available. These postulates assume that subjects first attempt to identify the propositions that are most and least likely to follow from the information given. They then use their beliefs in these propositions as anchors, relative to which the validity of other propositions is evaluated on the basis of both logical and nonlogical criteria. Two experiments are reported in which these postulates are used successfully to diagnose the logical and nonlogical factors that underlie inferences based upon both single statements and sets of syllogistically related propositions. The implications of the proposed postulates for existing formulations of social inference and cognitive organization are discussed.     

Contribution of conversation skills to the production of judgmental errors

An impressive body of evidence has accumulated demonstrating that many of the judgmental ‘errors’ or ‘biases’ formerly thought due to purely cognitive shortcomings actually reflect the operation of communication goals and strategies that people rely upon to comprehend and generate meaningful conversation. This study examines the effects of individual differences in conversational skills on the production of biased responses using six judgmental heuristics tasks: base-rate error, conjunction error, dilution effect, underuse of consensus information, primacy effect, and confirmation bias. Clarke's (1975) ‘method of reconstruction’ was used to obtain two measures of conversational sophistication: relevance-seeking and (un)responsiveness. A path analysis predicting biased judgments from the skill variables demonstrates that a combination of these variables, which we term ‘Pragmatic Competence’, is predictive of two independent subsets of the heuristics tasks. Our model provides convergent evidence with other, parametric studies for the proposition that biased social judgments are, at least in part, artifacts of participants' reasonable (and unreasonable!) expectations concerning experimenter cooperativeness. ‘The process of forming an integrated mental model of premises is nothing more than the proper comprehension of discourse: it is required in order to grasp the full impact of what the speaker has to say’ Johnson-Laird (1983, p. 119). © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Familiarity-Matching: An Ecologically Rational Heuristic for the Relationships-Comparison Task

Previous studies have shown that people often use heuristics in making inferences and that subjective memory experiences, such as recognition or familiarity of objects, can be valid cues for inferences. So far, many researchers have used the binary choice task in which two objects are presented as alternatives (e.g., “Which city has the larger population, city A or city B?”). However, objects can be presented not only as alternatives but also in a question (e.g., “Which country is city X in, country A or country B?”). In such a situation, people can make inferences based on the relationship between the object in the question and each object given as an alternative. In the present study, we call this type of task a “relationships-comparison task.” We modeled the three inference strategies that people could apply to solve it (familiarity-matching [FM; a new heuristic we propose in this study], familiarity heuristic [FH], and knowledge-based inference [KI]) to examine people's inference processes. Through Studies 1, 2, and 3, we found that (a) people tended to rely on heuristics, and that FM (inferences based on similarity in familiarity between objects) well explained participants' inference patterns; (b) FM could work as an ecologically rational strategy for the relationships–comparison task since it could effectively reflect environmental structures, and that the use of FM could be highly replicable and robust; and (c) people could sometimes use a decision strategy like FM, even in their daily lives (consumer behaviors). The nature of the relationships–comparison task and human cognitive processes is discussed.