| Popis: |
A recent line of research proposed to bring linguistic insights to the study of reasoning failures. This project focuses on fallacies involving disjunction and disjunction-like elements in language. Pragmatic accounts have been proposed to explain the attractiveness of these fallacies in terms of scalar implicature. It follows that these fallacies should be sensitive to the same manipulations that affect the computation of scalar implicatures. We use a dual-task paradigm to block scalar implicature processing. Illusory inferences from disjunction (or simply illusory inferences) as in (1) are very attractive. (1) Mary met every king or every queen of Europe. Mary met the king of Belgium. Fallacious conclusion: Mary met the king of Spain. Proof by countermodel: Mary met every queen of Europe, the king of Belgium and no one else. There are two kinds of accounts of these fallacies. (i) reasoning-based accounts such as the erotetic theory of reasoning, relying on mental models; and (ii) interpretation-based accounts relying on pragmatic processes. For a subset of illusory inferences, both reasoning processes and pragmatic processes conspire to create a strong effect (dual-source illusory inferences). For another subset, only reasoning processes predict a fallacy (single-source illusory inferences). It follows that only dual-source illusory inferences should be sensitive to pragmatic manipulations. Dual-source illusory inferences includes examples such as (1) and the propositional case (2). (2) There is a king and a ten in Kate's hand, or else a queen. There is a king in Kate's hand. Fallacious conclusion: There is a ten in Kate's hand. Proof by countermodel: There is a king and a queen and no ten in Kate's hand. Single-source illusory inferences includes the existential (3) and the modal (4) case. (3) Some pilot writes poems. John is a pilot. Fallacious conclusion: John writes poems. Proof by countermodel: John doesn't write poems and Rick, another pilot, writes poems. (4) Miranda might play the piano and be afraid of spiders. Miranda plays the piano. Fallacious conclusion: Miranda is afraid of spiders. Proof by countermodel: Miranda plays the piano and is not afraid of spiders. Our research question can be articulated as follows: what are the effects of pragmatic manipulations on different versions of illusory inferences from disjunction. We will use cognitive load to impair pragmatic processes. It will be implemented in two conditions: the easy condition (low memory load) and the hard condition (high memory load). Multiple experiments have shown that the later interferes with interpretation-based accounts. |
