The relative difficulty of negations of conjunctions and disjunctions—a mental model perspective

Yin, Peng-Fei; Sun, Jinrui; Wang, Moyun

doi:10.1007/s10339-020-01004-3

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…This finding is congruent with the previous finding that given a negated general disjunction (e. g, there is a pack of cards. For the cards, it not true that a card is round or it is red), the majority of participants listed the possibilities of ¬p¬q, p¬q and ¬pq, whereas the minority of participants listed the possibility of pq (Yin, et. al., 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A rule violation account for the reading of negated general disjunctions

Wang¹

2021

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Few previous studies have investigated how people read the negation of a general disjunction that refers to a set of objects (It is not true that xs are p or q). We develop four alternative accounts for the negation. The original mental model theory interprets the negation as the negation of the disjunction of possibilities allowed by the general disjunction. The revised mental model theory interprets it as the negation of the conjunction of possibilities allowed by the general disjunction. The probabilistic violation account interprets it as the probabilistic violation of the general disjunction by introducing nonnegligible exceptions. A normative semantic violation account interprets the negation as the semantic qualitative violation of the general disjunction by introducing exceptions. Three experiments systematically investigated the reading of negated general disjunctions in different possibility and truth judgment tasks. Participants’ possibility and truth judgments provide convergent evidence that a negated general disjunction is consistent with only sets containing ¬p¬q cases regardless of whether other cases are present or not, and people prefer to the semantic violation interpretation of negated general disjunctions. These findings favour the semantic violation account over the other accounts. This implies that the core meaning of a general disjunction is the rule represented by it, but not the set of possibilities referred to by it.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%