The importance of universal quantifiers in a hypothetical reasoning task

Prevarication: Reasoning from false assumptions

“…Usually Always True True Undecided False False Revlis et al, 1971) or have a range of credibility values, as in the present experiment. This is not to say that credibility will be unimportant when the statements within a problem are widely disparate with respect to credibility.…”

“…Current studies of prevarication have demonstrated the operation of specific inference processes in conjectural reasoning (Revlis & Hayes, 1972;Revlis, Lipkin, & Hayes, 1971): When people reason from false assumptions, they exhibit consistent strategies in the assignment of truth values to propositions. These strategies appear to be independent of the superficial form of the propositions and suggest that the reasoner is attending to deeper aspects of the problems.…”

“…Revlis et al (1971) showed that, when forced to choose between the truth of a generality (e.g., All As are Bs) and that of a particular fact (e.g., This Y is a Z), Ss tend to accept the generality and reject the fact. This 87 preference is more pronounced for generalities that affirm a relation than those that deny one: Affirmative generalities are assigned TRUE more often than are negative ones.…”

“…With respect to the first factor, Revlis et al (1971) tested the importance of the propositions' credibility by comparing the reasoner's decisions on familiar problems that contained real subjects and predicates (e.g., All snakes are reptiles) with decisions on unfamiliar problems, where the subjects and predicates were nonsense words (e.g., All trups are dorbes)-a method used by WiIkins (1928). Such statements are at best amphigorous (cf.…”

Grounded spatial belief revision

“…The experimental studies mostly used conditional reasoning problems in which an inconsistency arises between a fact, contradicting a valid conclusion, and the conditional and categorical premises. Within this research, psychologists were able to show that belief revision is affected by many factors, including asymmetries between particular facts and general laws (Revlis, Lipkin, & Hayes, 1971), conditional and categorical premises (Elio & Pelletier, 1997;Dieussaert, Schaeken, De Neys, & d'Ydewalle, 2000;Girotto, JohnsonLaird, Legrenzi, & Sonino, 2000;Revlin, Cate, & Rouss, 2001), major and minor premises (Politzer & Carles, 2001), and reliable and unreliable information sources (Wolf, Rieger, & Knauff, 2012).…”