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What is required for the truth of a general conditional?
Moyun Wang1, David Over2, Lixia Liang1
1School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (2006)
|March 9, 2022
Summary
People judge general conditionals based on the conditional probability of q given p (P(q|p)). Truth and possibility judgments depend on the presence of specific cases (p & q) and the absence of others (p & ¬q).
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Psychology
- Linguistics
Background:
- General conditionals (if p then q) are used to make assertions about sets of objects.
- Previous research indicates people often equate the probability of a conditional with the conditional probability P(q|p).
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the qualitative relationship between exhaustive possibilities and truth/possibility judgments of general conditionals.
- To test existing theories of conditionals, including material conditional, revised mental model theory, and suppositional theories.
Main Methods:
- Two experiments were conducted to examine truth and possibility judgments.
- Experiment 1 focused on truth judgments in relation to exhaustive possibilities.
- Experiment 2 focused on possibility judgments in relation to exhaustive possibilities.
Main Results:
- Truth judgments for general conditionals were found to depend solely on P(q|p), specifically on the presence of (p & q) cases and absence of (p & ¬q) cases.
- Possibility judgments indicated that only (p & q) cases need to be possible for a general conditional to be considered true of a set.
Conclusions:
- Results challenge the representation of general conditionals as material conditionals in extensional logic.
- Findings disconfirm recent proposals from revised mental model theory and certain inferentialist accounts.
- The study provides new support for suppositional theories of conditionals.
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