J. St. B.T. Evans
Uncertain deduction and conditional reasoning
Evans, J. St. B.T.; Thompson, V.A.; Over, D.E.
Abstract
There has been a paradigm shift in the psychology of deductive reasoning. Many researchers no longer think it is appropriate to ask people to assume premises and decide what necessarily follows, with the results evaluated by binary extensional logic. Most every day and scientific inference is made from more or less confidently held beliefs and not assumptions, and the relevant normative standard is Bayesian probability theory. We argue that the study of “uncertain deduction” should directly ask people to assign probabilities to both premises and conclusions, and report an experiment using this method. We assess this reasoning by two Bayesian metrics: probabilistic validity and coherence according to probability theory. On both measures, participants perform above chance in conditional reasoning, but they do much better when statements are grouped as inferences, rather than evaluated in separate tasks.
Citation
Evans, J. S. B., Thompson, V., & Over, D. (2015). Uncertain deduction and conditional reasoning. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 398. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00398
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Publication Date | Apr 1, 2015 |
Deposit Date | May 12, 2016 |
Publicly Available Date | May 24, 2016 |
Journal | Frontiers in Psychology |
Print ISSN | 1664-1078 |
Publisher | Frontiers Media |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 6 |
Article Number | 398 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00398 |
Files
Published Journal Article
(912 Kb)
PDF
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2015 Evans, Thompson and Over. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
You might also like
What is required for the truth of a general conditional?
(2022)
Journal Article
Probabilities of conditionals and previsions of iterated conditionals
(2020)
Journal Article
The Psychology of Uncertainty and Three-Valued Truth Tables
(2018)
Journal Article
Probabilistic inferences from conjoined to iterated conditionals
(2018)
Journal Article
Downloadable Citations
About Durham Research Online (DRO)
Administrator e-mail: dro.admin@durham.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search