Naive theories and causal deduction

Abstract

Evidence is presented that implicates two factors in deductive reasoning about causality. The factors are alternative causes and disabling conditions (factors that prevent effects from occurring in the presence of viable causes). A causal analysis is presented in which these factors impact onjudgments concerning causal necessity and sufficiency, which in turn determine deductive entailment relations. In Experiment 1, these factors were found to impact causal deductive judgments more strongly than did logical form. In Experiment 2, causal deductive judgments were found to vary as a function of familiarity with a particular causal relationship: The more familiar the causal relationship, the less willing reasoners were to accept conclusions based on them.

The modulation of conditional assertions and its effects on reasoning

“…An alternative antecedent for the proposition, "if you catch fish then you have a fish supper" is that you buy fish from a shop. When such an alternative is salient, then individuals are less likely to infer fallaciously that if you didn't catch fish then you didn't have a fish supper (see, e.g., Byrne, 1989aByrne, , 1989bCummins, 1995;Cummins, Lubart, Alksnis, & Rist, 1991;De Neys, Schaeken, & d'Ydewalle, 2005;Janveau-Brennan & Markovits, 1999;Markovits & Vachon, 1990).…”

Probabilities, causation, and logic programming in conditional reasoning: reply to Stenning and Van Lambalgen (2016)

“…However, we have shown dysfunctional exception handling in high schyzotypes (Sellen, Oaksford, & Gray, 2005). High schizotypes showed no effect of many disablers in a replication of Cummins (1995) with high and low schizotypy groups.…”

“…In, for example, Geiger and Oberauer (2007), number of disablers was an independent variable in a factorial design. 11 We do not doubt that the correlations SL mention will be observed but the upshot of Geiger and 11 In the similar factorial designs used by Cummins (1995), effect sizes were not reported so we cannot determine whether in these studies number of different disablers "..explains[s] a good deal of variance.." or not.…”

“…In this section, SL respond to our suggestion that the implicit suppression paradigm (e.g. Cummins, 1995) is problematic for LP. They argue that this paradigm shows that an alternative, more qualitative, LP approach to suppression effects is possible.…”

“…The need to construct causal models also derives from another part of the procedure used in experiments like Cummins (1995), where in a pre-test participants are asked to generate as many disablers or alternative causes as they can in one minute. For LP, presumably, this just involves reading the items off the abnormality list for the rule.…”