Conditional Probability and the Cognitive Science of Conditional Reasoning

2003 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 359-379 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Oaksford ◽  
Nick Chater
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (s3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingya Liu

AbstractThe concept of conditionality is central to human thought and action. Conditionals are thus a widely studied topic in cognitive science. The present paper introduces the main topics addressed in this special issue and aims to provide a non-exhaustive overview of the recent research on grammatical aspects of conditionals (i.e. morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics) and conditional reasoning.


Author(s):  
David Over

There is a new Bayesian, or probabilistic, paradigm in the psychology of reasoning, with new psychological accounts of the indicative conditional of natural language and of conditional reasoning. Dorothy Edgington has had a major impact on this new paradigm, through her views on inference from uncertain premises, the relation between the probability of the indicative conditional, P(if p then q), and the conditional probability, P(q|p), and the use of the Ramsey test to evaluate conditionals. Accounts are given in this chapter of the psychological experiments in the new paradigm that confirm empirical hypotheses inspired by her work and other philosophical sources.


Author(s):  
Rani Lill Anjum ◽  
Stephen Mumford

When dealing with probability in causal claims, conditional reasoning seems unavoidable since we will want to know the probability of an effect, if the cause occurs. Conditional probability is typically defined in terms of the ratio of the unconditional probabilities of the elements. But when it comes to cause and effect, there are good reasons to think that this does not hold and that the conditional probability is primitive. It can be shown that a number of problematic but valid inferences from classical logic reproduce in the calculation of conditional probability if the ratio analysis is employed. The primitivist response is to take the conditional connection as unanalysable.


2020 ◽  
Vol 43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles P. Davis ◽  
Gerry T. M. Altmann ◽  
Eiling Yee

Abstract Gilead et al.'s approach to human cognition places abstraction and prediction at the heart of “mental travel” under a “representational diversity” perspective that embraces foundational concepts in cognitive science. But, it gives insufficient credit to the possibility that the process of abstraction produces a gradient, and underestimates the importance of a highly influential domain in predictive cognition: language, and related, the emergence of experientially based structure through time.


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