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

Mascarenhas, Salvador; Picat, Léo

doi:10.3765/salt.v29i0.4635

Cited by 6 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Accordingly, the erotetic theory expects "might" to drive fallacious conclusions in the right configurations. Building on this theoretical work, Mascarenhas and Picat (2019) proved that these modal constructions bring about illusory inferences, as exemplified in (13).…”

Section: Does It Follow That John Writes Poems?mentioning

confidence: 85%

“…The theory now predicts that the reasoner will jump to the fallacious conclusion that John is the pilot who writes poems in question. Mascarenhas and Picat (2019) give an explanation of the modal case of illusory inferences along the same lines. This constitutes a reasoning-based account for both the indefinite and modal cases of illusory inferences.…”

Section: Two Classes Of Illusionsmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Similarly to the indefinite case, these inferences are accepted around 35% of the time, significantly more than mistakes are made on invalid controls (Mascarenhas & Picat, 2019). Yet, again, the conclusion does not follow.…”

Section: Does It Follow That Miranda Is Afraid Of Spiders?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The crucial driver of fallacious reasoning behind (1) seems to be the disjunction "or" as a generator of alternative possibilities. Accordingly, the literature has established the existence of other fallacies with linguistic elements semantically related to disjunction but superficially very dissimilar, specifically indefinite expressions ("some students") and certain modal expressions ("might") (Mascarenhas & Koralus, 2017;Mascarenhas & Picat, 2019). These inferences thus form a large and diverse collection of compelling fallacies, while being unified by the presence of a well-studied class of linguistic elements, and being comparatively brief and simple in their syntax.…”

Section: Interpretation and Reasoning In Compelling Fallaciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is lower than for the standard case and its universal variant just reviewed, an important issue we will return to shortly. Mascarenhas and Picat (2019) recently discovered yet another new case of illusory inferences. Ciardelli et al (2009) argued that the epistemic modal "might" also has a disjunction-like semantics.…”

Section: Does It Follow That John Writes Poems?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the interplay between interpretation and reasoning in compelling fallacies

Picat¹,

Mascarenhas²

2020

Preprint

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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.

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Section: Does It Follow That John Writes Poems?mentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Two Classes Of Illusionsmentioning

confidence: 93%

Section: Does It Follow That Miranda Is Afraid Of Spiders?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Interpretation and Reasoning In Compelling Fallaciesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Does It Follow That John Writes Poems?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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On the interplay between interpretation and reasoning in compelling fallacies

Picat¹,

Mascarenhas²

2020

Preprint

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Super Linguistics: an introduction

Patel-Grosz

Mascarenhas

Chemla

et al. 2023

Linguist and Philos

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We argue that formal linguistic theory, properly extended, can provide a unifying framework for diverse phenomena beyond traditional linguistic objects. We display applications to pictorial meanings, visual narratives, music, dance, animal communication, and, more abstractly, to logical and non-logical concepts in the ‘language of thought’ and reasoning. In many of these cases, a careful analysis reveals that classic linguistic notions are pervasive across these domains, such as for instance the constituency (or grouping) core principle of syntax, the use of logical variables (for object tracking), or the variety of inference types investigated in semantics/pragmatics. The aim of this overview is to show how the application of formal linguistic concepts and methodology to non-linguistic objects yields non-trivial insights, thus opening the possibility of a general, precise theory of signs. (An appendix, found in the online supplements to this article, surveys applications of Super Linguistics to animal communication.)

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

Sablé-Meyer

Mascarenhas

2021

Rev.Phil.Psych.

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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 proved to be 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.

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

Cited by 6 publications

References 14 publications

On the interplay between interpretation and reasoning in compelling fallacies

On the interplay between interpretation and reasoning in compelling fallacies

Super Linguistics: an introduction

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

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