Laws of language use and formal logic

Politzer, Guy

doi:10.1007/bf01067391

Cited by 87 publications

(43 citation statements)

References 110 publications

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“…Whereas the role of pragmatics is appreciated as critical in the reasoning literature, especially for describing non-normative responses (e.g., Macchi, 1995;Politzer, 1986, Politzer & Noveck, 1991van der Henst, 1999), few take advantage of pragmatics in order to elucidate reasoning more generally as we do here (for a notable exception, see Sperber, Cara, & Girotto, 1995). The present contribution is twofold.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Linguistic-pragmatic factors in interpreting disjunctions

Noveck

Chierchia

Chevaux

et al. 2002

Thinking & Reasoning

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The connective or can be treated as an inclusive disjunction or else as an exclusive disjunction. Although researchers are aware of this distinction, few have examined the conditions under which each interpretation should be anticipated. Based on linguistic-pragmatic analyses, we assume that interpretations are initially inclusive before either (a) remaining so, or (b) becoming exclusive by way of an implicature (but not both). We point to a class of situations that ought to predispose disjunctions to inclusive interpretations and to situations that encourage exclusive interpretations. A disjunction's ultimate interpretation is based on its potential informativeness, where the interpretation of the disjunctive utterance having the smallest number of true conditions is considered most informative. Our investigation leads to five experiments employing arbitrary materials. Among the problems expected to encourage inclusive interpretations are those that present disjunctions in the antecedents of conditionals and in question forms. The best candidates to produce implicatures are those disjunctions that underdetermine an expected conjunctive conclusion, although other disjunctive utterances that are more informative as exclusive are discussed and tested.Requests for reprints should be sent to

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 70%

Linguistic-pragmatic factors in interpreting disjunctions

Noveck

Chierchia

Chevaux

et al. 2002

Thinking & Reasoning

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“…They simply have not yet (or not to the same extent as adults) developed the ability to go beyond the explicitly stated. Only after children have successfully proceeded through their cognitive development will they be able to attend to and benefit from the semantic and pragmatic subtleties of natural language and social communication (see also Braine & Rumain, 1981;Paris, 1973;Politzer, 1986;Sternberg, 1979). This very ability, however, can result in judgments that violate rules of probability theory or logic -rules that interpret connectives such as and or or in a purely logical sense.…”

Section: The Conjunction Fallacy: a Misunderstanding About Conjunction?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The conjunction fallacy and the many meanings of and

2008

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a b s t r a c tAccording to the conjunction rule, the probability of A and B cannot exceed the probability of either single event. This rule reads and in terms of the logical operator^, interpreting A and B as an intersection of two events. As linguists have long argued, in natural language ''and" can convey a wide range of relationships between conjuncts such as temporal order (''I went to the store and bought some whisky"), causal relationships (''Smile and the world smiles with you"), and can indicate a collection of sets rather than their intersection (as in ''He invited friends and colleagues to the party"). When ''and" is used in word problems researching the conjunction fallacy, the conjunction rule, which assumes the logical operator^, therefore cannot be mechanically invoked as a norm. Across several studies, we used different methods of probing people's understanding of and-conjunctions, and found evidence that many of those respondents who violated the conjunction rule in their probability or frequency judgments inferred a meaning of and that differs from the logical operator^. We argue that these findings have implications for whether judgments involving ambiguous and-conjunctions that violate the conjunction rule should be considered manifestations of fallacious reasoning or of reasonable pragmatic and semantic inferences.Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.. . .it is a mistake to analyze natural language words like and as being identical to entities of the man-made logical terminology which so clearly derives from natural language (rather than the other way around) and so clearly has needs and purposes distinct from those of natural language (Sweetser, 1990, p. 92).One of the most frequent words in the English language is and. In Leech, Rayson, and Wilson's (2001) analysis of word frequencies in a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken language (the British National Corpus) the unremarkable three-letter word ''and" is the third most frequent word. Its commonness and plainness, however, do not mean that the most general connective in the English language lacks the ability to convey a wide range of relationships between the states of affairs described by the conjuncts. In fact, one reason for linguists' enduring fascination with and is that among all coordinating conjunctions (e.g., or, but, nor) it has the least semantic and syntactic limits, the least specific meaning, and the highest context dependency (Lang, 1991).Take, for instance, the use of and in (1): (1) Her husband is in hospital and she is seeing other men.As Kitis (2000) pointed out, the and in (1) does much more than conjoin the two clauses. Rather, it functions as an ''emotional device" that communicates the speaker's emotional attitude, surprise, or even outrage.The notion of and's context dependency stands in stark contrast with the highly constrained meaning of the logical and operator (^). The logical^represents the Boolean intersection of two sets. For illustration, if set A contains all even numbers (mu...

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“…Other evidence shows that young children interpret conditionals as akin to conjunctions (see, e.g., Delval & Riviere, 1975;Kuhn, 1977;Paris, 1973;Politzer, 1986). O'Brien and his colleagues, however, have argued that if is not understood as and (O'Brien, 1999, p. 399;O'Brien, Dias, & Roazzi, 1998).…”

Section: The Corroboration Of the Principle Of Implicit Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conditionals: A theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference.

Johnson‐Laird

Byrne²

2002

Psychological Review

633

747

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The authors outline a theory of conditionals of the form If A then C and If A then possibly C. The 2 sorts of conditional have separate core meanings that refer to sets of possibilities. Knowledge, pragmatics, and semantics can modulate these meanings. Modulation can add information about temporal and other relations between antecedent and consequent. It can also prevent the construction of possibilities to yield 10 distinct sets of possibilities to which conditionals can refer. The mental representation of a conditional normally makes explicit only the possibilities in which its antecedent is true, yielding other possibilities implicitly. Reasoners tend to focus on the explicit possibilities. The theory predicts the major phenomena of understanding and reasoning with conditionals.

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Laws of language use and formal logic

Cited by 87 publications

References 110 publications

Linguistic-pragmatic factors in interpreting disjunctions

Linguistic-pragmatic factors in interpreting disjunctions

The conjunction fallacy and the many meanings of and

Conditionals: A theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inference.

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