When Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence: Rational Inferences From Absent Data

Hsu, Anne; Horng, Andy; Griffiths, Thomas L.; Chater, Nick

doi:10.1111/cogs.12356

Cited by 15 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Under the entrenchment hypothesis 3 ( Braine & Brooks, 1995 ), repeated occurrences of a particular verb root (e.g., laugh ) contribute to an ever-strengthening probabilistic inference that it cannot be used grammatically in structures in which it has not yet appeared (e.g., * The clown laughed the man ; the transitive-causative); a kind of rational Bayesian inference from absence (e.g., Hsu, Horng, Griffiths, & Chater, 2017 ). Intuitively, one way to interpret entrenchment is the inference that “given how often I've heard this verb root in general, if it were permitted in this structure, I would have heard it by now”.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This preregistered study tested three theoretical proposals for how children form productive yet restricted linguistic generalizations, avoiding errors such as *The clown laughed the man , across three age groups (5–6 years, 9–10 years, adults) and five languages (English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'). Participants rated, on a five-point scale, correct and ungrammatical sentences describing events of causation (e.g., *Someone laughed the man; Someone made the man laugh ; Someone broke the truck ; ?Someone made the truck break ). The verb-semantics hypothesis predicts that, for all languages, by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by the extent to which the causing and caused event (e.g., amusing and laughing) merge conceptually into a single event (as rated by separate groups of adult participants). The entrenchment and preemption hypotheses predict, for all languages, that by-verb differences in acceptability ratings will be predicted by, respectively, the verb's relative overall frequency, and frequency in nearly-synonymous constructions (e.g., X made Y laugh for *Someone laughed the man ). Analysis using mixed effects models revealed that entrenchment/preemption effects (which could not be distinguished due to collinearity) were observed for all age groups and all languages except K'iche', which suffered from a thin corpus and showed only preemption sporadically. All languages showed effects of event-merge semantics, except K'iche' which showed only effects of supplementary semantic predictors. We end by presenting a computational model which successfully simulates this pattern of results in a single discriminative-learning mechanism, achieving by-verb correlations of around r = 0.75 with human judgment data.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…52 This inference assumes Bayesian absent evidence reasoning. See (Stephens 2011) and (Hsu et al 2017). 53 For an example of a skeptical take on concepts, see (Machery 2009).…”

Section: E N D N O T E Smentioning

confidence: 99%

Are there really any dual‐character concepts?

Phillips,

Plunkett

2023

Philosophical Perspectives

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There has been growing excitement in recent years about “dual‐character” concepts. Philosophers have argued that such concepts can help us make progress on a range of philosophical issues, from aesthetics to law to metaphysics. Dual‐character concepts are thought to have a distinctive internal structure, which relates a set of descriptive features to an abstract value, and which allows people to use either the descriptive features or the abstract value for determining the extension of the concept. Here, we skeptically investigate the central argument in favor of their existence. Across three new empirical studies, we systematically demonstrate that the linguistic patterns that dual‐character concepts were originally posited to explain are likely better explained by much more general features of language use.

show abstract

“…"James has very good handwriting.") Importantly, this effect is sensitive to the perceived expertise of the source; no such implication follows for unknowledgable informants (see also Bonawitz et al, 2011;Gweon et al, 2014;Hsu, Horng, Griffiths, & Chater, 2017).…”

Section: Formalizing a Pragmatic Account Of The Weak Evidence Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

A pragmatic account of the weak evidence effect

Barnett¹,

Hawkins²,

Griffiths³

2021

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Language is not only used to inform. We often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be taken at face value. How should listeners account for a speaker's "hidden agenda" when incorporating new information? Here, we extend recent probabilistic models of recursive social reasoning to allow for persuasive goals and show that our model provides a new pragmatic explanation for why weakly favorable arguments may backfire, a phenomenon known as the weak evidence effect. Critically, our model predicts a relationship between belief updating and speaker expectations: weak evidence should only backfire when speakers are expected to act under persuasive goals, implying the absence of stronger evidence. We introduce a simple experimental paradigm called the Stick Contest to measure the extent to which the weak evidence effect depends on speaker expectations, and show that a pragmatic listener model accounts for the empirical data better than alternative models. Our findings suggest potential avenues for rational models of social reasoning to further illuminate decision-making phenomena.

show abstract

When Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence: Rational Inferences From Absent Data

Cited by 15 publications

References 21 publications

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'

The crosslinguistic acquisition of sentence structure: Computational modeling and grammaticality judgments from adult and child speakers of English, Japanese, Hindi, Hebrew and K'iche'

Are there really any dual‐character concepts?

A pragmatic account of the weak evidence effect

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About