scholarly journals Disjunctive illusory inferences and how to eliminate them

2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (5) ◽  
pp. 615-623 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sangeet Khemlani ◽  
P. N. Johnson-Laird
Keyword(s):  
Illusory Inferences

Spatial conditionals and illusory inferences

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 348-365 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Ragni ◽  
Tobias Sonntag ◽  
Philip N. Johnson-Laird
Keyword(s):  
Illusory Inferences

Illusory inferences about probabilities

1996 ◽  
Vol 93 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 69-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.N. Johnson-Laird ◽  
Fabien Savary
Keyword(s):  
Illusory Inferences

A Re-examination of illusory inferences based on factual conditional sentences

2001 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-25
Author(s):  
Paolo Cherubini ◽  
Alberto Mazzocco ◽  
Simona Gardini ◽  
Aurore Russo
Keyword(s):  
Illusory Inferences ◽  
Factual Conditional

scholarly journals Indirect illusory inferences from disjunction: a new bridge between deductive inference and representativeness

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Sablé-Meyer ◽  
Salvador Mascarenhas
Keyword(s):  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
Broad Class ◽  
Structural Similarity ◽  
Conjunction Fallacy ◽  
Behavioral Experiments ◽  
Bayesian Confirmation Theory ◽  
Matching Procedure ◽  
Structural Connection ◽  
Illusory Inferences ◽  
Fallacious Reasoning

We provide a new link between deductive and probabilistic reasoning fallacies. Illusory inferences from disjunction are a broad class of deductive fallacies traditionally explained by recourse to a matching procedure that looks for content overlap between premises. In two behavioral experiments, we show that this phenomenon is instead sensitive to real-world causal dependencies and not to exact content overlap. A group of participants rated the strength of the causal dependence between pairs of sentences. This measure is a near perfect predictor of fallacious reasoning by an independent group of participants in illusory inference tasks with the same materials. In light of these results, we argue that all extant accounts of these deductive fallacies require non-trivial adjustments. Crucially, these novel indirect illusory inferences from disjunction bear a structural similarity to seemingly unrelated probabilistic reasoning problems, in particular the conjunction fallacy from the heuristics and biases literature. This structural connection was entirely obscure in previous work on these deductive problems, due to the theoretical and empirical focus on content overlap. We argue that this structural parallelism provides arguments against the need for rich descriptions and individuating information in the conjunction fallacy, and we outline a unified theory of deductive illusory inferences from disjunction and the conjunction fallacy, in terms of Bayesian confirmation theory.

scholarly journals ‘Might’ as a generator of alternatives: the view from reasoning

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvador Mascarenhas ◽  
Léo Picat
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Natural Language Semantics ◽  
Inquisitive Semantics ◽  
Epistemic Modal ◽  
Psychology Of Reasoning ◽  
Language Semantics ◽  
Hamblin Semantics ◽  
Illusory Inferences

We argue that the epistemic modal ‘might’ is a generator of alternatives in the sense of Hamblin semantics (Kratzer & Shimoyama 2002) or inquisitive semantics (Ciardelli, Groenendijk & Roelofsen 2009). Building on methodologies from the psychology of reasoning, we show that ‘might’ patterns with disjunctions and with indefinites in giving rise to a particular kind of illusory inference. The best extant accounts of these illusory inferences crucially involve alternatives, paired with matching strategies (Walsh & Johnson-Laird 2004) or with question-answer dynamics (Koralus & Mascarenhas 2013). Our results constitute further steps toward convergence between theories and methodologies in natural language semantics and the psychology of reasoning.

scholarly journals On the interplay between interpretation and reasoning in compelling fallacies

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Léo Picat ◽  
Salvador Mascarenhas
Keyword(s):  
Deductive Reasoning ◽  
Broad Class ◽  
Task Design ◽  
Judgment Task ◽  
Human Reasoning ◽  
Value Judgment ◽  
Psychology Of Reasoning ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Illusory Inferences

We investigate the articulation between domain-general reasoning and interpretive processes in failures of deductive reasoning. We focus on illusory inferences from disjunction-like elements, a broad class of deductive fallacies studied in some detail over the past 15 years. These fallacies have received accounts grounded in reasoning processes, holding that human reasoning diverges from normative standards. A subset of these fallacies however can be analyzed differently: human reasoning is not to blame, instead the premises were interpreted in a non-obvious, yet perfectly predictable and reasonable way. Once we consider these interpretations, the apparent fallacious conclusion is no mistake at all. We give a two-factor account of these fallacies that incorporates both reasoning-based elements and interpretive elements, showing that they are not in real competition. We present novel experimental evidence in favor of our theory. Cognitive load such as induced by a dual-task design is known to hinder the interpretive mechanisms at the core of interpretation-based accounts of the fallacies of interest. In the first experiment of its kind using this paradigm with an inferential task instead of a simpler truth-value-judgment task, we found that the manipulation affected more strongly those illusions where our theory predicts that interpretive processes are at play. We conclude that the best way forward for the field to investigate the elusive line between reasoning and interpretation requires combining theories and methodologies from linguistic semantics and the psychology of reasoning.

scholarly journals A formal theory can explain disjunctive illusory inferences.

2014 ◽  
Vol 60 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel López Astorga
Keyword(s):  
Formal Theory ◽  
Illusory Inferences
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