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A Priori True and False Conditionals.

Ana Cristina Quelhas1, Célia Rasga1, Philip N Johnson-Laird2,3

  • 1William James Center for Research, ISPA-Instituto Universitário.

Cognitive Science
|April 4, 2017
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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The theory of mental models suggests meaning influences conditional interpretation, predicting some conditionals are true or false without evidence. Experiments confirmed this, supporting the mental model theory over other reasoning frameworks.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Philosophy of Mind
  • Logic

Background:

  • The theory of mental models posits that meaning and knowledge influence how conditional statements are interpreted.
  • A computational implementation of this theory suggested that certain conditionals could be deemed true or false independently of empirical evidence.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To experimentally test the prediction that some conditionals are true or false without needing external evidence, as implied by the theory of mental models.
  • To compare the mental model theory with alternative theories of reasoning, including those based on logic, probabilistic logic, and suppositions.

Main Methods:

  • Three experiments were conducted involving participants evaluating the truth value (true/false or possible/impossible) of various conditional statements.
Keywords:
ConditionalsDeductive reasoningLogicMental modelsModulationPossibilities

Related Experiment Videos

  • Participants provided justifications for their judgments, including completing sentence frames and offering explanations.
  • Experiment 3 specifically assessed participants' evaluations of the four possible cases within the partitions of conditional statements.

    • Main Results:

    • The experimental results corroborated the predictions derived from the theory of mental models.
    • Participants' judgments indicated that certain conditionals were evaluated as true or false without requiring specific evidence.
    • Justifications provided by participants varied, with some offering explanations rather than purely logical reasoning.

    Conclusions:

    • The findings support the theory of mental models as an explanation for conditional reasoning.
    • The results challenge purely logic-based or probabilistic logic theories by demonstrating the role of meaning and knowledge in interpretation.
    • The study highlights the importance of considering mental representations in understanding human reasoning processes.