A “new rhetoric” for a “new dialectic”: Prolegomena to a responsible public argument

This essay offers, as a counterpart to pragma-dialectical argument, a “new rhetoric” produced in the situated discourse of a public forum when a community addresses matters of common urgency and undertakes informed action. Such a rhetoric takes the principles of discourse ethics as its informing dialectic by identifying an interlocutor as one who is obligatedboth to argue effectively,and also to hold open, even reinforce, norms of communicative reason. Implications concerning the study of fallacies and theethos obligations of communicative reasoning are discussed.     

A theory of argumentative understanding: Relationships among position preference,judgments of goodness,memory and reasoning

Data are presented that focus on the nature and development of argumentative reasoning. In particular our study describes how support for or against an issue affects memory for critical parts of an argumentative interaction, judgments of argument goodness, and the content of the reasons given in support of one view versus another. Two other factors were examined: developmental differences in argumentation skill and the conditional nature of supporting one side of an argument across varying contexts. Our results show that even seven year old children can recognize, identify, and use the basic components of an argument to provide evidence for and make judgements about their favored position. Moreover, if position support is held constant across all age groups of students, seven year old children were found to give reasons and explanations that were highly similar in content and principle to college students. The same similarities held across age with respect to biases in memory and judgements of argument goodness. The primary difference between children's and college students' argument behavior lay in the side of an argument the students chose to support. Seven year old children and some eleven yearold children supported positions that impute more value to friendship and social consequences than to the maintenance and advancement of individual rights, as specified in a contract agreement. The similarities and differences across development are discussed with respect to a theory of argumentation that speaks to the importance of understanding the nature of goal conflict and a theory of intentionality in predicting how arguments will be represented and resolved.     

Motivated to Forgive? Partisan Scandals and Party Supporters

In this study, we investigate how partisan motivations shape voters' reactions to a political scandal by drawing on a unique survey experiment fielded immediately after Justin Trudeau's brownface/blackface scandal broke during the 2019 Canadian election. We thus explore motivated reasoning in real time in a competitive and highly partisan election context. Are voters more willing to forgive politicians for past behavior when their own party leader's impropriety is cued? To what extent do personal interests, such as cross-pressures or electoral concerns, affect the motivation to forgive? Our findings show that partisan-motivated reasoning is overwhelmingly powerful, producing politically biased judgments of politicians implicated in scandals. Furthermore, voters' willingness to forgive scandals is also influenced by “strategic” considerations, in that preferences over which political party wins or loses in the election affect opinions about whether someone should be forgiven or whether the scandal is considered important at all. However, we find no evidence that personal involvement in the issue raised by the scandal conditions partisan motivations. We posit that the environment—in this case, a competitive election—is an important consideration for understanding the extent and limits of partisan-motivated reasoning.     

规则变型推理对远迁移问题解决的促进

为了避免多重变异样例学习和采用题海战术,并能促进规则样例学习的远迁移问题解决,开创出原样例学习后对原型规则做出变型推理的学习方法,以算术应用题的解题样例为原样例学习材料进行了4项实验研究。结果显示：四年级小学生运用该方法可有效促进远迁移问题的解决;其变型推理能力存在数学成绩等级差异;提供问题情境和推理提示能提高部分学生规则变型推理成绩和远迁移测验成绩。实验结果证明,规则变型推理是促进远迁移问题解决的有效方法之一。     

Ask me why,don't tell me why: Asking children for explanations facilitates relational thinking

Identifying abstract relations is essential for commonsense reasoning. Research suggests that even young children can infer relations such as “same” and “different,” but often fail to apply these concepts. Might the process of explaining facilitate the recognition and application of relational concepts? Based on prior work suggesting that explanation can be a powerful tool to promote abstract reasoning, we predicted that children would be more likely to discover and use an abstract relational rule when they were prompted to explain observations instantiating that rule, compared to when they received demonstration alone. Five- and 6-year-olds were given a modified Relational Match to Sample (RMTS) task, with repeated demonstrations of relational (same) matches by an adult. Half of the children were prompted to explain these matches; the other half reported the match they observed. Children who were prompted to explain showed immediate, stable success, while those only asked to report the outcome of the pedagogical demonstration did not. Findings provide evidence that explanation facilitates early abstraction over and above demonstration alone.     

A plausible role of imagination in pretend play,counterfactual reasoning,and executive functions

A notable observation is the similarities in the cognitive processes of pretend play (PP) and counterfactual reasoning (CFR) as both involve thinking about alternatives to reality. It is argued by Weisberg and Gopnik (Cogn. Sci., 37, 2013, 1368) that alternative thinking in PP and CFR is underpinned by an imaginary representational capacity but few studies have empirically investigated this link. We use a variable latent modelling approach to test a hypothetical model of the structural relationship of PP and CFR predicting that if PP and CFR are cognitively similar; they should have similar patterns of associations with Executive Functions (EFs). Data were collected on PP, CFR, EFs and Language from 189 children (M = 4.8 years, males = 101, females = 88). Confirmatory factor analyses showed that measures of PP and CFR loaded onto single latent constructs and were significantly correlated (r = .51, p = .001) with each other. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses revealed that EF accounted for unique significant variance in both PP (β = 21) and CFR (β = 22). The results of the structural equation modelling revealed that the data were a good fit for the hypothetical model. We discuss the plausible role of a general underlying imaginative representational capacity to explain similarities in the cognitive mechanisms of different states of alternative thinking like PP and CFR.     

The Adaptive Logic of Compatibility

This paper describes the adaptive logic of compatibility and its dynamic proof theory. The results derive from insights in inconsistency-adaptive logic, but are themselves very simple and philosophically unobjectionable. In the absence of a positive test, dynamic proof theories lead, in the long run, to correct results and, in the short run, sometimes to final decisions but always to sensible estimates. The paper contains a new and natural kind of semantics for S5from which it follows that a specific subset of the standard worlds-models is characteristic for S5.     

12岁儿童充分条件假言推理能力发展的个体差异研究

以三类不同题目（与生活经验密切联系、与生活经验相悖、与生活经验“脱离”）,探查了12岁普通儿童与数学成绩优异儿童充分条件假言推理能力发展的个体差异。通过对测查成绩的聚类分析,可将被试划分为四种不同的类型,从而显示出同一年龄儿童不同的推理能力发展水平：普通组儿童有关推理能力已有初步发展,但推理过程仍经常受其具体内容的束缚;数学成绩优异组儿童假设思维和演绎推理能力协调发展,“形式”从“内容”的束缚中解放出来,推理思维活动能较好地符合有关逻辑规则。这两组儿童假言推理能力的差异可能跟智能水平有关。     

Time and Singular Causation—A Computational Model

Causal queries about singular cases, which inquire whether specific events were causally connected, are prevalent in daily life and important in professional disciplines such as the law, medicine, or engineering. Because causal links cannot be directly observed, singular causation judgments require an assessment of whether a co-occurrence of two events c and e was causal or simply coincidental. How can this decision be made? Building on previous work by Cheng and Novick (2005) and Stephan and Waldmann (2018), we propose a computational model that combines information about the causal strengths of the potential causes with information about their temporal relations to derive answers to singular causation queries. The relative causal strengths of the potential cause factors are relevant because weak causes are more likely to fail to generate effects than strong causes. But even a strong cause factor does not necessarily need to be causal in a singular case because it could have been preempted by an alternative cause. We here show how information about causal strength and about two different temporal parameters, the potential causes' onset times and their causal latencies, can be formalized and integrated into a computational account of singular causation. Four experiments are presented in which we tested the validity of the model. The results showed that people integrate the different types of information as predicted by the new model.     

Categories and causality: the neglected direction

The standard approach guiding research on the relationship between categories and causality views categories as reflecting causal relations in the world. We provide evidence that the opposite direction also holds: categories that have been acquired in previous learning contexts may influence subsequent causal learning. In three experiments we show that identical causal learning input yields different attributions of causal capacity depending on the pre-existing categories to which the learning exemplars are assigned. There is a strong tendency to continue to use old conceptual schemes rather than switch to new ones even when the old categories are not optimal for predicting the new effect, and when they were motivated by goals that differed from the present context of causal discovery. However, we also found that the use of prior categories is dependent on the match between categories and causal effect. Whenever the category labels suggest natural kinds which can be plausibly related to the causal effects, transfer was observed. When the categories were arbitrary, or could not be plausibly related to the causal effect learners abandoned the categories, and used different categories to predict the causal effect.