Schmidt James R, Thompson A
Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Mem Cognit. 2008 Jan;36(1):217-29. doi: 10.3758/mc.36.1.217.
In formal reasoning, the quantifier "some" means "at least one and possibly all." In contrast, reasoners often pragmatically interpret "some" to mean "some, but not all" on both immediate-inference and Euler circle tasks. It is still unclear whether pragmatic interpretations can explain the high rates of errors normally observed on syllogistic reasoning tasks. To address this issue, we presented participants (reasoners) in the present experiments either standard quantifiers or clarified quantifiers designed to precisely articulate the quantifiers' logical interpretations. In Experiment 1, reasoners made significantly more logical responses and significantly fewer pragmatic responses on an immediate-inference task when presented with logically clarified as opposed to standard quantifiers. In Experiment 2, this finding was extended to a variant of the immediate-inference task in which reasoners were asked to deduce what followed from premises they were to assume to be false. In Experiment 3, we used a syllogistic reasoning task and observed that logically clarified premises reduced pragmatic and increased logical responses relative to standard ones, providing strong evidence that pragmatic responses can explain some aspects of the errors made in the syllogistic reasoning task. These findings suggest that standard quantifiers should be replaced with logically clarified quantifiers in teaching and in future research.
在形式推理中，量词“有些”表示“至少一个，也可能是全部”。相比之下，在直接推理任务和欧拉图任务中，推理者常常从语用角度将“有些”解释为“有些，但不是全部”。语用解释是否能够解释三段论推理任务中通常观察到的高错误率，目前仍不清楚。为了解决这个问题，在本实验中，我们向参与者（推理者）呈现的要么是标准量词，要么是经过澄清的量词，这些经过澄清的量词旨在精确表述量词的逻辑解释。在实验1中，与标准量词相比，当呈现经过逻辑澄清的量词时，推理者在直接推理任务中做出的逻辑反应显著增多，语用反应显著减少。在实验2中，这一发现扩展到了直接推理任务的一个变体，即要求推理者从他们认为是错误的前提中推断出结论。在实验3中，我们使用了三段论推理任务，观察到相对于标准前提，经过逻辑澄清的前提减少了语用反应，增加了逻辑反应，这有力地证明了语用反应可以解释三段论推理任务中出现的某些错误。这些发现表明，在教学和未来的研究中，标准量词应该被经过逻辑澄清的量词所取代。
