Dept. of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, Univ. of London, United Kingdom; Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich, Germany.
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich, Germany; Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; Arché Research Centre, University of St Andrew's, United Kingdom.
Cogn Psychol. 2020 Nov;122:101329. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2020.101329. Epub 2020 Aug 14.
Conditionals and conditional reasoning have been a long-standing focus of research across a number of disciplines, ranging from psychology through linguistics to philosophy. But almost no work has concerned itself with the question of how hearing or reading a conditional changes our beliefs. Given that we acquire much-perhaps most-of what we believe through the testimony of others, the simple matter of acquiring conditionals via others' assertion of a conditional seems integral to any full understanding of the conditional and conditional reasoning. In this paper we detail a number of basic intuitions about how beliefs might change in response to a conditional being uttered, and show how these are backed by behavioral data. In the remainder of the paper, we then show how these deceptively simple phenomena pose a fundamental challenge to present theoretical accounts of the conditional and conditional reasoning - a challenge which no account presently fully meets.
条件句和条件推理一直是许多学科的研究重点，包括心理学、语言学和哲学。但是，几乎没有任何工作关注听到或读到一个条件句如何改变我们的信念。鉴于我们通过他人的证言获得了我们所相信的大部分知识，通过他人断言一个条件句来获得条件句的这个简单问题似乎是对条件句和条件推理的全面理解的关键。在本文中，我们详细介绍了一些关于信念如何因说出一个条件句而发生变化的基本直觉，并展示了这些直觉如何得到行为数据的支持。在本文的其余部分，我们将展示这些看似简单的现象如何对条件句和条件推理的现有理论解释构成根本性挑战——目前还没有任何一个解释能够完全应对这一挑战。
