scholarly journals How children and adults keep track of real information when thinking counterfactually

PLoS ONE ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (12) ◽  
pp. e0242967
Author(s):  
Jesica Gómez-Sánchez ◽  
José Antonio Ruiz-Ballesteros ◽  
Sergio Moreno-Ríos
Keyword(s):  
Counterfactual Thinking ◽  
Epistemic Status ◽  
Great Ability ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
The Third ◽  
Potential Sources ◽  
As If

Thinking about counterfactual conditionals such as “if she had not painted the sheet of paper, it would have been blank” requires us to consider what is conjectured (She did not paint and the sheet was blank) and what actually happened (She painted and the sheet was not blank). In two experiments with adults (Study 1) and schoolchildren from 7 to 13 years (Study 2), we tested three potential sources of difficulty with counterfactuals: inferring, distinguishing what is real vs conjectured (epistemic status) and comprehending linguistic conditional expressions (“if” vs “even if”). The results showed that neither adults nor schoolchildren had difficulty in the comprehension of counterfactual expressions such as “even if” with respect to “if then”. The ability to infer with both of these develops during school years, with adults showing great ability. However, the third source factor is critical: we found that the key to young children’s difficulty with counterfactual thinking was their inability to differentiate real and conjectured information, while adults showed little difficulty with this.

As If That Look Must Be the Last

Last Things ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Khalip
Keyword(s):  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
End Of The World ◽  
As If ◽  
Politics Of Life

The final chapter reads the third-to-last line of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, “as if that look must be the last,” as an aside that asks what occurs after that last look. In a post-Waterloo poem that imagines a hallucinatory end-of-the-world scenario amidst several last things, including a kiss, Shelley explores the adjacencies opened up by his unfinished late piece. Drawing on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, an illustration from that book by Nicolas Monsiau, and a photograph by Peter Hujar, Shelley’s poetic experiment is characterized as tacitly queer insofar as it refuses to endorse a normative politics of life, and imagines bodies and pleasures as scintillatingly regressive, inoperative, and disappearing.

The Third Stage

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Le Fanu
Keyword(s):  
Optic Nerves ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
As If

‘I see, Dr Hesselius, that you don’t lose one word of my statement. I need not ask you to listen specially to what I am now going to tell you. They talk of the optic nerves, and of spectral illusions, as if the organ of...

Indicative conditionals

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Jackson
Keyword(s):  
Actual Situation ◽  
Indicative Conditionals ◽  
Counterfactual Conditionals ◽  
Correct Account ◽  
As If

Examples of indicative conditionals are ‘If it rained, then the match was cancelled’ and ‘If Alex plays, Carlton will win’. The contrast is with subjunctive or counterfactual conditionals, such as ‘If it had rained, then the match would have been cancelled’, and categoricals, such as ‘It will rain’. Despite the ease with which we use and understand indicative conditionals, the correct account of them has proved to be very difficult. Some say that ‘If it rained, the match was cancelled’ is equivalent to ‘Either it did not rain, or the match was cancelled’. Some say that the sentence asserts that the result of ‘adding’ the supposition that it rained to the actual situation is to give a situation in which the match was cancelled. Some say that to assert that if it rained then the match was cancelled is to make a commitment to inferring that the match was cancelled should one learn that it rained. This last view is often combined with the view that indicative conditionals are not, strictly speaking, true or false; rather, they are more or less assertible or acceptable.

Counterfactuals need not be comparative: The case of “As if”

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 461-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keith D. Markman ◽  
Matthew N. McMullen
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Evaluation ◽  
Counterfactual Thinking ◽  
Counterfactual Simulation ◽  
As If

AbstractByrne (2005) assumes that counterfactual thinking requires a comparison of facts with an imagined alternative. In our view, however, this assumption is unnecessarily restrictive. We argue that individuals do not necessarily engage in counterfactual simulations exclusively to evaluate factual reality. Instead, comparative evaluation is often suspended in favor of experiencing the counterfactual simulation as if it were real.

THE MEDIEVAL ARCHIVE AND THE HISTORY OF THEATRE: ASSESSING THE WRITTEN AND UNWRITTEN EVIDENCE FOR PREMODERN PERFORMANCE

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Symes
Keyword(s):  
Religious Life ◽  
The Body ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
As If

Soon after he was consecrated bishop in 963, Æthelwold of Winchester (909–84) began to promulgate a series of new rules for worship and religious life in the monasteries of England. In one passage that is well known to theatre historians, Æthelwold insisted on the following performance of the Easter morning liturgy.While the third lesson is being read aloud, four of the brothersshould dress themselves.One of them, wearing an alb,should come in as though intent on other businessand gostealthilyto the place of the sepulchre, and therehe should sit quietly….The three remaining brothers …should make their way slowly and haltingly, coming before the place of the sepulchreas if they are seeking something. For these things are done in imitation of the angel seated on the tomb and of the women coming with perfumes to anoint the body of Jesus.When, therefore, the one sitting there sees the three drawing near, who are still wandering aboutas though seeking something, he should begin to singsweetly, in amoderatevoice: “Whom do you seek?”

The Third British Empire: Transplanting the English Shire to Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and America

1997 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myron C. Noonkester
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
World History ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Third ◽  
Simple Matter ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Vast Literature ◽  
Scholarly Attention ◽  
Modern Nation State ◽  
As If

During their hegemony in world affairs, the English exported persons, commodities, and texts to regions that they absorbed into a widening pale of influence. Discussion of these ventures has consumed a vast literature. What once seemed to be a simple matter of transporting Protestantism (or convicts) into an overseas wilderness or making distant lands safe for English farming and trade now seems a matter too complex to be captured in a metaphor or an alliterative catchphrase. Yet it remains a matter of historical fascination that a relatively small archipelago off the coast of Europe not only could become the first “modern” nation-state but could then transform itself into a vast global empire, ultimately making it seem as if the affairs of this proverbial workshop encompassed world history itself. For many years, such success seemed too evident for investigation, and scholarly attention turned toward explaining how this achievement unraveled or declined. The result has been a quest for detailed precision and microhistorical reconstruction on the part of those who have adopted an “empirical,” geopolitical approach to imperialism and an outpouring of criticism from those who, on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, have penned polemical classics whose evocative, if not evidentiary, power envisioned revolution as historical destiny and a means of filling the intellectual and political void left by imperial evacuation. Their disagreements notwithstanding, however, both categories of imperial commentary display relative innocence of the paradox that imperial power represented: that, despite voluble criticism, it enjoyed eclipsing success for a time and produced effects whose mysteries continue to survive postcolonial deconstruction.

scholarly journals Mental Models in Deductive Reasoning

2002 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan A. García-Madruga ◽  
Francisco Gutiérrez ◽  
Nuria Carriedo ◽  
Sergio Moreno ◽  
Philip N. Johnson-Laird
Keyword(s):  
Mental Models ◽  
Model Theory ◽  
Deductive Reasoning ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Syllogistic Reasoning ◽  
Linguistic Structure ◽  
The Third ◽  
As If

We report research investigating the role of mental models in deduction. The first study deals with conjunctive inferences (from one conjunction and two conditional premises) and disjunctive inferences (from one disjunction and the same two conditionals). The second study examines reasoning from multiple conditionals such as: If e then b; If a then b; If b then c; What follows between a and c? The third study addresses reasoning from different sorts of conditional assertions, including conditionals based on if then, only if, and unless. The paper also presents research on figural effects in syllogistic reasoning, on the effects of structure and believability in reasoning from double conditionals, and on reasoning from factual, counterfactual, and semifactual conditionals. The findings of these studies support the model theory, pose some difficulties for rule theories, and show the influence on reasoning of the linguistic structure and the semantic content of problems.

Recording the Absent Inside the Maison de Verre

IDEA JOURNAL ◽  
2012 ◽  
pp. 98-111
Author(s):  
Emma Cheatle
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Young Children ◽  
Dust Particles ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
Ground Floor ◽  
The Third ◽  
Large Glass ◽  
Family Home ◽  
As If

The Maison de Verre (Pierre Chareau) was completed in Paris in 1932 for Dr Jean Dalsace, his wife Annie and their two young children. The front façade, a skin of glass, conceals a family home and a gynaecology clinic. Information on the building’s 1930s inhabitation is missing leaving an archival gap. Proposition: In 1933 there were two visitors. He attended the weekly Salon gathering. She secretly visited the clinic. They were lovers, the artist Marcel Duchamp and bookbinder Mary Reynolds. Duchamp’s artwork, the Large Glass (1915–23), suggests a glass premonition to their interactions. The writing or drawing out of a story of possible inhabitation is, in the end, the potential of architecture. In this account, I reconstruct the Maison de Verre’s interior as a history through modes of text and drawing that combine spatial analysis with imagined occupation. New plan drawings with theoretical and fictional text combine images, routes, passages. In the first part, ‘The Glass Look’, the building seems to survey the salon visitor (Marcel), as instances caught in glass. ‘Regarding’ positions Annie Dalsace’s mediating presence, traced into her ambiguous circulations around the upper floors. In the third part, ‘Dust’, I speculate on Mary’s visit. Searching the building as if its housekeeper, I find little to suggest she was there, just the uncertainty of dust particles. In ‘Horizontal Passages’ I follow Mary’s imagined route through the ground floor clinic and trace her body through its remainders, dust particles and smears.

The Question of Justice in the Novel of Consciousness

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 148-173
Author(s):  
Michael Vander Weele
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World War ◽  
Marilynne Robinson ◽  
The Third ◽  
As If

Abstract Marilynne Robinson’s achievement in the third novel of the Iowa trilogy can be seen more clearly if measured against Erich Auerbach’s ambivalence about the novel of consciousness. Using Auerbach’s final chapter of Mimesis, on Virginia Woolf, as the horizon for Robinson’s work clarifies two points: Robinson’s work should be viewed within a novel-of-consciousness tradition that is as much European as American; and Robinson’s religious interests turn that tradition toward a more anthropological concern with the complexity of consciousness framed by the concern for justice. While Nicholas Damas’s recent essay in The Atlantic, “The New Fiction of Solitude” (April 2016), claimed that much new fiction “imagines teaching us how to be separate” and Walter Benjamin already wrote at mid-century that “the ability to exchange experiences” disappeared sometime after World War I, in Lila it is as if Marilynne Robinson set out to show both the difficulty and the possibilities of such exchange.

Having Made Peace through the Blood of the Cross

Grotiana ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 28-45
Author(s):  
Eltjo Schrage
Keyword(s):  
Public Interest ◽  
Roman Law ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Cross ◽  
As If

In his Defensio fidei catholicae de satisfactione Christi adversus Faustum Socinum Senensem Grotius makes use of sources taken from Roman law. We discuss three examples and ask the question whether something may be said about the weight of the arguments Grotius has taken from Roman law, mainly the Digest. The first one relates to his belief that it is a matter of public interest that crimes do not remain unpunished and he calls this argument even a trivial commonplace: Hoc enim iudicare videtur trita sententia delicta puniri publice interest. (2) The second example is Grotius’s thesis that si alio animo alius idem solvat, liberatio non contingit. (3) The third example is his thesis that ex Romanorum legibus … poenae variantur pro conditione personarum which he also justifies with an impressive number of references. The conclusion is that Grotius uses these arguments, as if they were propositions suitable to function as part of the theological construction apt to rebut the views of Socinus, but for that purpose Grotius´s quotations are generally taken out of their original context and landed on a sort of Procrustean bed of his theological presuppositions.

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