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.     

Emotions,concepts and the indeterminacy of natural kinds

Synthese - A central question for philosophical psychology is which mental faculties form natural kinds. There is hot debate over the kind status of faculties as diverse as consciousness, seeing,...     

"Let Us Be Saints if We Can"

Stanley Hauerwas's Gifford Lectures are, at least in part, an interpretation of the Giffords that came before him. As a contribution to intellectual and theological history, however, I wish Hauerwas had given witness to Santayana's Hermes the hermeneut, along with the considerable, indeed considerate, witness he does give to his own Christian faith. Hauerwas seems to dislike Reinhold Niebuhr and, by my account, misreads William James. Thus I have to conclude that With the Grain of the Universe does not measure up to his own more capacious and incisive works.     

Conditional reasoning, representation, and empirical evidence on a concrete task

This study examined interactions between empirical data, internal representations, and reasoning performance on a conditional reasoning task using a concrete apparatus. Subjects were asked an initial series of questions in order to determine the pattern of inferences they made after simple exposure to the apparatus. They were subsequently shown two different experimental manipulations designed to provide data about the internal structure of the apparatus without giving information about specific inferences. Some subjects did change their reasoning in response to the new data, although most remained stable throughout the experiment. These results are consistent with the idea that reasoning may require generation of an internal representation of a problem space. It was also concluded that the relation between reasoning and empirical evidence cannot be understood without supposing that evidence is often interpreted by subjects according to their reasoning patterns.