Emergence of Social Reasoning About Hierarchies

As long as there have been theories about common knowledge, they have been exposed to a certain amount of skepticism. Recent more sophisticated arguments question whether agents can acquire common attitudes and whether they are needed in social reasoning. I argue that this skepticism arises from assumptions about practical reasoning that, considered in themselves, are at worst implausible and at best controversial. A proper approach to the acquisition of attitudes and their deployment in decision making leaves room for common attitudes. Postulating them is no worse off than similar idealizations that are usefully made in logic and economics.

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The pervasive role of pragmatics in early language

10.31234/osf.io/v8e56 ◽

2019 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Manuel Bohn ◽

Michael C. Frank

Keyword(s):

Language Learning ◽

Common Ground ◽

Social Cues ◽

Social Reasoning ◽

Early Language ◽

Computational Framework ◽

Linguistic Pragmatics ◽

Developmental Continuity ◽

Pragmatic Reasoning

Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret language in context. In this review, we take a pragmatic perspective on language development and argue for developmental continuity between early non-verbal communication, language learning, and linguistic pragmatics. We link phenomena from these different literatures by relating them to a computational framework (the rational speech act framework), which conceptualizes communication as fundamentally inferential and grounded in social cognition. The model specifies how different information sources (linguistic utterances, social cues, common ground) are combined when making pragmatic inferences. We present evidence in favor of this inferential view and review how pragmatic reasoning supports children’s learning, comprehension, and use of language.

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How origin stories shape children's social reasoning

10.31234/osf.io/tca8z ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Emily Foster-Hanson ◽

Marjorie Rhodes

Keyword(s):

Social World ◽

Social Reasoning ◽

Common Mechanism ◽

Social Category ◽

Cultural Contexts ◽

Explicit Information ◽

Origin Stories ◽

Embedded Knowledge ◽

The Social ◽

The Many

How do we explain the behavior of the many people we meet throughout our lives? Children and adults sometimes consider other people in terms of their social category memberships (e.g., assuming that a girl likes pink because she is a girl), but people view some categories as more informative than others, and which people think of as informative varies across cultural contexts. One type of culturally-embedded knowledge that appears to shape whether people view particular categories as providing explanations for behavior are beliefs about how the category came to be. In the current studies with 4- to 5-year-old children (N = 206), we ask how learning about quasi-scientific or supernatural causal origins of a category shapes young children’s use of categories to predict and explain what category members are like. In Study 1, children more often used a category to explain behavior when they heard the category described as intentionally created by a powerful being than when they heard no explicit information about its origins. In Studies 2 and 3, learning about both quasi-scientific and supernatural causal origins shaped children’s social category beliefs via a common mechanism: by signaling that the category marked a non-arbitrary way of dividing up the social world.

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CARD GAME TO IMPROVE CRITICAL THINKING

Journal of Global Engagement and Transformation ◽

10.52553/30001b ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Julia Gressick ◽

Joel B. Langston

Keyword(s):

Critical Thinking ◽

Undergraduate Students ◽

Student Learning Outcomes ◽

Thinking Skills ◽

Social Contexts ◽

Student Understanding ◽

Critical Thinking Skills ◽

Social Reasoning ◽

Classroom Implementation ◽

Iterative Design

Fostering critical thinking skills is a ubiquitous goal across disciplines and social contexts. Productive solutions to educational, content-based and social problems can emerge through well-reasoned conversation. How best to support the development of these skills has been a topic of debate. In this study, we investigated the design and effectiveness of a card-based game focused on undergraduate student understanding of common fallacies in thinking. 13 Fallacies was designed with the intention of improving students’ reasoning. In our study, we completed an iterative design phase, play testing phase and have collected data on student learning outcomes from two semesters as a result of classroom implementation. Results indicate that 13 Fallacies improved student understanding of common fallacies in thinking and promoted social reasoning for at-risk undergraduate students.

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