Reasoning about intentions: Counterexamples to reasons for actions.

Abstract

Four experiments tested the idea that people distinguish between biconditional, conditional, and enabling intention conditionals by thinking about counterexamples. The experiments examined intention conditionals that contain different types of reasons for actions, such as beliefs, goals, obligations, and social norms, based on a corpus of 48 intention conditionals established through an extensive materials test (n = 136). Experiment 1 (n = 19) showed that retrieved alternative reasons suppress the affirmation of the consequent and denial of the antecedent inferences from conditional intentions, whereas retrieved disabling reasons suppress the modus ponens and modus tollens inferences from enabling intentions. Experiment 2 (n = 61) showed that the suppression effects also occur for explicitly provided alternatives and disablers, for a large corpus of 80 intention conditionals. Experiment 3 (n = 60) showed that the suppression effects also occur for unfamiliar content, for which participants cannot rely on prior knowledge or beliefs about probabilities. Experiment 4 (n = 26) showed that participants retrieve alternatives and disablers readily for intentions just as they do for causal conditionals. The implications of the results for alternative accounts based on possibilities and probabilities are discussed.

Teoria da mente e pensamento contrafactual em crianças de baixo nível socioeconómico

“…Previous work has shown that people tend to think differently about the actions when they have knowledge about the reasons behind those actions. An important step towards understanding the actions of others is reasoning about their intentions (Juhos, Quelhas, & Byrne, 2015;Walsh & Byrne, 2007). Children aged 6 and 8 years were tested with a new task: the change of intentions task, which included scenarios where an actor has an initial reason (desire or obligation) for an action, which is subsequently changed.…”

The Suppression of Inferences From Counterfactual Conditionals

“…It occurs whether participants are explicitly told about additional or alternative conditions, or instead retrieve them from memory (e.g., Cummins, Lubart, Alksnis, & Rist, 1991; De Neys, Schaeken, & D’Ydewalle, 2002, 2003; Dieusseurt, Schaeken, Schroyens, & d’Ydewalle, 2000; Verschueren, Schaeken, & d'Ydewalle, 2005), whether they make a categorical judgment about what follows, or a judgment about their degree of certainty in the conclusion (e.g., Geiger & Oberauer, 2007; Markovits, Brisson, & de Chantal, 2015; Markovits, Brunet, & Lortie Forges, 2010), and whether the additional condition is presented as an enabler, for example, “if the sun shone the plants bloomed” or a disabler, for example, “if the sun did not shine the plants did not bloom” (e.g., Markovits et al, 2010; see also Markovits & Potvin, 2001). In many everyday situations, causal outcomes are over‐determined or depend on multiple joint causes (e.g., Kominsky, Phillips, Gerstenberg, Lagnado, & Knobe, 2015; Rehder, 2014; Strickland, Silver, & Keil, 2017), and suppression occurs not only for inferences about causal relations but also for relations based on intentions (e.g., Juhos, Quelhas, & Byrne, 2015), inducements (e.g., Couto, Quelhas, & Byrne, 2017), and polite discourse (e.g., Bonnefon & Hilton, 2002, 2004; Demeure, Bonnefon, & Raufaste, 2009; see also Chan & Chua, 1994). Despite the extensive research on the suppression effect, no studies have examined how it interacts with other beliefs, or with other reasoning effects, such as the counterfactual elevation effect, to which we now turn.…”

Chronometrical Evidence Supports the Model Theory of Negation

“…The MMT explained these results by applying the concept of mental models, which are defined as iconic representations of the possibilities elicited by a piece of given information (Johnson-Laird, 1983, 2006, 2010a, 2010b. The MMT suggests that human reasoning proceeds by representing possibilities and testing counterexamples to evaluate consistency (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991;Johnson-Laird, Khemlani, & Goodwin, 2015) and to distinguish between biconditionals, conditionals, and intention conditionals (Juhos, Quelhas, & Byrne, 2015). An extension of the MMT that covers the meaning, representation, and use of negation has been recently proposed by Khemlani et al (2012Khemlani et al ( , 2014.…”