New paradigm psychology of reasoning: An introduction to the special issue edited by Elqayam, Bonnefon, and Over

Elqayam, Shira; Over, David E.

doi:10.1080/13546783.2013.841591

Cited by 68 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 61 publications

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“…These results provide support for a broadly Bayesian approach to the psychology of reasoning (Elqayam & Over, 2013;Oaksford & Chater, 2001Over, 2009). …”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 48%

Discounting testimony with the argument ad hominem and a Bayesian congruent prior model.

Bhatia

Oaksford

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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When directed to ignore evidence of a witness' previous bad character because of a violation of the rules of evidence, are jurors' beliefs still affected? The intuition is that they will be because in everyday argumentation, fallacies, like the ad hominem, are effective argumentative strategies. An ad hominem argument (against the person) undermines a conclusion by questioning the character of the proposer. This intuition divides current theories of argumentation. According to pragmadialectical theory (e.g., Van Eemeren & Grootendorst, 2004) procedural rules exactly like the rules of evidence are part of our cognitive resources for evaluating arguments. If one of these rules is violated, an argument should be treated as a fallacy and so it should not alter someone's belief in the conclusion.Some recent experiments investigating how reasonable these arguments are perceived to be seem to support this account (Van Eemeren, Garssen, & Meufells, 2009). These experiments are critiqued from the perspective of the relevance (Walton, 2008(Walton, , 2009) and epistemic (Hahn & Oaksford, 2006Oaksford & Hahn, 2004) approaches to argumentation. An experiment investigates the predictions of these approaches for a graded belief change version of Van Eemeren et al.'s (2009) experiment and the results are modelled using a Bayesian congruent prior model. These results cannot be explained by the pragmadialectical approach and show that in everyday argument people are extremely sensitive to the epistemic relevance of evidence. Moreover, it seems highly unlikely that this can be switched off in more formal contexts such as the courtroom. In the court room, many factors affect how persuasive jurors find the arguments put forward by counsel (Spellman & Schauer, 2012). The arguments presented in court are constrained by strict procedural rules about, for example, admissible evidence, not asking leading questions and so on. These procedural rules guarantee the quality of the arguments and evidence.However, lawyers occasionally violate these rules, intentionally or unintentionally, in order to influence the jury. For example, counsel may introduce evidence of a witness' previous bad character, e.g., media reports of drunkenness or wife abuse. In In the US, under the Federal Rules of Evidence (2014) this may be inadmissible as irrelevant hearsay but only if the opposing counsel objects will the judge rule on its admissibility. At this point, she can inform the jury that the rules of evidence have been violated and direct them to ignore the evidence.The goal of the arguments put forward in court is to bring about quantitative changes in jurors' degrees of belief, ultimately, in the guilt or innocence of the defendant. When the judge points out that an argument, e.g., the witness abused his wife, violates a rule of evidence does this affect jurors' degrees of belief in the conclusions they are asked to evaluate? Pointing out the violation is intended to remove any effect of the argument on jurors' degree of belief but once it has...

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“…These results provide support for a broadly Bayesian approach to the psychology of reasoning (Elqayam & Over, 2013;Oaksford & Chater, 2001Over, 2009). …”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 48%

Discounting testimony with the argument ad hominem and a Bayesian congruent prior model.

Bhatia

Oaksford

2015

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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“…Niki Pfeifer is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, BMBF (grant 01UL1906X) and was supported by Erasmus+. 30…”

Section: Acknowledgmentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Influenced by the above points, psychologists of reasoning have tested the CPH in controlled experiments, and found that people tend to conform to it for a wide range of conditionals, from indicative conditionals ( [31,35,73]) and conditional bets ( [5]) to counterfactuals and causal conditionals ( [69,70,81,82]). In the opinion of some authors, the CPH may not hold for conditionals if A then C when the antecedent A does not raise the probability of the conditional's consequent C ( [26,88]), but the significance of this finding is open to dispute ( [69]), and the general support for the CPH has had a major impact in psychology ( [30,68]), formal epistemology ( [76]), and philosophical logic ( [75,78,79,80]). But what can we say about the semantics and logic of conditionals, under CPH?…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Probabilities of conditionals and previsions of iterated conditionals

Sanfilippo

Gilio

Over

et al. 2020

International Journal of Approximate Reasoning

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We analyze selected iterated conditionals in the framework of conditional random quantities. We point out that it is instructive to examine Lewis's triviality result, which shows the conditions a conditional must satisfy for its probability to be the conditional probability. In our approach, however, we avoid triviality because the import-export principle is invalid. We then analyze an example of reasoning under partial knowledge where, given a conditional if A then C as information, the probability of A should intuitively increase. In our approach, we explain this intuition by making some implicit background information explicit. We consider several (generalized) iterated conditionals, which allow us to formalize different kinds of latent information. We verify that for these iterated conditionals the prevision is greater than or equal to the probability of A. We also investigate the lower and upper bounds of the Affirmation of the Consequent inference. We conclude our study with some remarks on the supposed "independence" of two conditionals, and we interpret this property as uncorrelation between two random quantities.

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“…But then how can it be reasonable not to go out in the rain? This example shows that interpreting the conditional as a material conditional leads to absurd implications when applied to everyday contexts in which we use conditionals (Elqayam & Over, 2013;Pfeifer, 2013b). Further evidence for a conditional event interpretation of conditionals comes from the truth table task.…”

mentioning

confidence: 91%

Comparing the meanings of “if” and “all”

Cruz

Oberauer

2014

Mem Cogn

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In this study, we compared the everyday meanings of conditionals ("if p then q") and universally quantified statements ("all p are q") when applied to sets of elements. The interpretation of conditionals was predicted to be directly related to the conditional probability, such that P("if p then q") = P(q|p). Quantified statements were assumed to have two interpretations. According to an instance-focused interpretation, quantified statements are equivalent to conditionals, such that P("all p are q") = P(q|p). According to a set-focused interpretation, "all p are q" is true if and only if every instance in set p is an instance of q, so that the statement would be accepted when P(q|p) = 1 and rejected when this probability was below 1. We predicted an instance-focused interpretation of "all" when the relation between p and q expressed a general law for an infinite set of elements. A set-focused interpretation of "all" was predicted when the relation between p and q expressed a coincidence among the elements of a finite set. Participants were given short context stories providing information about the frequency of co-occurrence of cases of p, q, not-p, and not-q in a population. They were then asked to estimate the probability that a statement (conditional or quantified) would be true for a random sample taken from that population. The probability estimates for conditionals were in accordance with an instance-focused interpretation, whereas the estimates for quantified statements showed features of a set-focused interpretation. The type of the relation between p and q had no effect on this outcome.

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New paradigm psychology of reasoning: An introduction to the special issue edited by Elqayam, Bonnefon, and Over

Cited by 68 publications

References 61 publications

Discounting testimony with the argument ad hominem and a Bayesian congruent prior model.

Discounting testimony with the argument ad hominem and a Bayesian congruent prior model.

Probabilities of conditionals and previsions of iterated conditionals

Comparing the meanings of “if” and “all”

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