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Conditionals and inferential connections : a hypothetical inferential theory
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Douven, Igor, Elqayam, Shira, Singmann, Henrik and van Wijnbergen-Huitink, Janneke (2018) Conditionals and inferential connections : a hypothetical inferential theory. Cognitive Psychology, 101 . pp. 50-81. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.09.002
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.09.002
Abstract
Intuition suggests that for a conditional to be evaluated as true, there must be some kind of connection between its component clauses. In this paper, we formulate and test a new psychological theory to account for this intuition. We combined previous semantic and psychological theorizing to propose that the key to the intuition is a relevance-driven, satisficing-bounded inferential connection between antecedent and consequent. To test our theory, we created a novel experimental paradigm in which participants were presented with a soritical series of objects, notably colored patches (Experiments 1 and 4) and spheres (Experiment 2), or both (Experiment 3), and were asked to evaluate related conditionals embodying non-causal inferential connections (such as “If patch number 5 is blue, then so is patch number 4”). All four experiments displayed a unique response pattern, in which (largely determinate) responses were sensitive to parameters determining inference strength, as well as to consequent position in the series, in a way analogous to belief bias. Experiment 3 showed that this guaranteed relevance can be suppressed, with participants reverting to the defective conditional. Experiment 4 showed that this pattern can be partly explained by a measure of inference strength. This pattern supports our theory’s “principle of relevant inference” and “principle of bounded inference,” highlighting the dual processing characteristics of the inferential connection.
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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| Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology | ||||||||
| Divisions: | Faculty of Science > Psychology | ||||||||
| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Cognitive psychology | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Cognitive Psychology | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Elsevier | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0010-0285 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | March 2018 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 101 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 50-81 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2017.09.002 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Open Access | ||||||||
| Open Access Version: |
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