Deontic and epistemic reasoning in children revisited: Comment on Dack and Astington |
| |
Authors: | Denise Dellarosa Cummins |
| |
Affiliation: | Departments of Psychology and Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL 61820, USA |
| |
Abstract: | Dack and Astington (Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 110 2011 94–114) attempted to replicate the deontic reasoning advantage among preschoolers reported by Cummins (Memory & Cognition 24 1996 823–829) and by Harris and Nuñez (Child Development. 67 1996 572–1591). Dack and Astington argued that the apparent deontic advantage reported by these studies was in fact an artifact due to a methodological confound, namely, inclusion of an authority in the deontic condition only. Removing this confound attenuated the effect in young children but had no effect on the reasoning of 7-year-olds and adults. Thus, removing reference to authority “explains away” young children’s apparent precocity at this type of reasoning. But this explanation rests on (a) a misunderstanding of norms as targets of deontic reasoning and (b) conclusions based on a sample size that was too small to detect the effect in young children. |
| |
Keywords: | Deontic Epistemic Hypothesis testing Social norms Reciprocal contracts Wason task |
本文献已被 ScienceDirect 等数据库收录! |
|