Study on Human Deductive Reasoning: Conditional Perfection and the Mental Models Theory
The study of human deductive reasoning by means of inferential hypothesis has been an interdisciplinary area of scientific inquiry inside cognitive psychology, analytical philosophy, and pragma-linguistic accounts: a human science inquiry. An interesting and relevant phenomenon related to deductive...
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| Tipo de recurso: | tesis doctoral |
| Estado: | Versión publicada |
| Fecha de publicación: | 2020 |
| País: | Chile |
| OAI Identifier: | oai:repositorio.anid.cl:10533/249746 |
| Acceso en línea: | https://hdl.handle.net/10533/249746 |
| Access Level: | acceso abierto |
| Palabra clave: | Humanidades Otras Humanidades |
| Sumario: | The study of human deductive reasoning by means of inferential hypothesis has been an interdisciplinary area of scientific inquiry inside cognitive psychology, analytical philosophy, and pragma-linguistic accounts: a human science inquiry. An interesting and relevant phenomenon related to deductive reasoning tasks and the way subjects process conditional information has been called Conditional Perfection (CP). To illustrate this phenomenon, think about a conditional statement with the form “If A then B,” then include the content in this structure. The main idea in this thesis is that the outcome of the interpretation will be the result of the content discrimination, specially the retrieval of counterexamples or additional alternatives in the cognitive process. As a result, when the content of the premises is tightly connected with the conclusion, the tendency will be a biconditional interpretation; that is, the acceptance of “If and only if A then B” as a valid inference. This tendency has many consequences which are going to be explained in this investigation. The objective of this research is to give an account of the general and particular discussions and explanation of this phenomenon. For instance, the Theory of Mental Models (Johnson-Laird et al., 2018) will support the idea that CP might be better understood as an iconic mental representation with low cognitive effort based on disabling conditions and alternative causes fleshed out in an analytical cognitive process. On the other hand, there are other explanations based on a pragmatic approach, which explained CP as an implicature that depends on the quantity maxim, like in Grice’s explanations; Moldovan (2009) and Geis & Zwicky (1971) are some representatives of this account. These two possible explanations agree on the fact that reasoners accept conditional inferences in a different way depending on the content of the premises. Nevertheless, the pragmatic approach does not consider the empirical evidence of the cognitive accounts. This thesis tries to do a theoretical integration between linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science in order to evaluate the main discrepancies and give an insight of the main factors involved in this reasoning process, adopting a qualitative and quantitative methodology. The main results in this investigation are that, first, the pragmatic account in linguistics and philosophy of language should integrate new evidence from the area of cognitive science. Second, mental models theory is a more robust theory that explained CP including information about alternatives and counterexamples retrieved from cognitive processes. Third, in the experiment, there were no difference between inferential rules, like the affirmation of the consequent and the denial of the antecedent, and that the main difference is the acceptance or rejection of inferences due to content discrimination. Finally, the findings show that conditional inferences with neutral content tend to a conditional interpretation, and those with causal content tend to a biconditional interpretation. |
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