Byrne Ruth M J, Johnson-Laird P N
School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience, Lloyd Building, Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
Trends Cogn Sci. 2009 Jul;13(7):282-7. doi: 10.1016/j.tics.2009.04.003. Epub 2009 Jun 18.
'If' is a puzzle. No consensus has existed about its meaning for over two thousand years. Here, we show how the main psychological theories deal with the seven crucial problems that it raises. These competing explanations treat 'if' as though it was a term in a formal logic, or as eliciting the construction of a mental model of the world, or as an instruction to suppose that a proposition holds. The solution to 'if' would be a major step towards understanding how people reason, and towards implementing a computer program that can reason in a human way. We argue that the mental model theory is closer to resolving the puzzle of 'if' than its competitors.
“如果”是一个谜题。两千多年来，人们对其含义一直没有达成共识。在此，我们展示了主要的心理学理论如何处理它所引发的七个关键问题。这些相互竞争的解释将“如果”视为形式逻辑中的一个术语，或者视为引发对世界心理模型的构建，或者视为一种假设某个命题成立的指令。解决“如果”问题将是朝着理解人们如何推理以及实现能够以人类方式进行推理的计算机程序迈出的重要一步。我们认为，心理模型理论比其竞争对手更接近解决“如果”之谜。
