Shaanxi Key Laboratory of Behavior and Cognitive Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University, 199 Chang'an Road, Yanta, Xi'an, 710062, China.
Cogn Process. 2021 Feb;22(1):65-76. doi: 10.1007/s10339-020-01004-3. Epub 2020 Nov 28.
A current issue in propositional reasoning is which of negated disjunctions and conjunctions are more difficult to understand. Using the possibility generation and evaluation tasks, we investigated how people make possibility inferences from negated compound assertions such as not (A and B) and not (A or B). We derive 4 different strategies of negation from the mental model theory (the enumerative negation, the eliminative negation, the element negation, and the clause negation) to predict the relative difficulty of possibility inference from not (A and B) and not (A or B). The results of three experiments convergently demonstrate that possibility inference from not (A or B) is harder than that from not (A and B). Moreover, an interpretation of negation as the complement of the set of possibilities allowed by a compound assertion is in line with the results of not (A and B) rather than not (A or B). The overall results favor the clause negation strategy over the other strategies.
目前命题推理中的一个问题是，否定析取和否定合取哪个更难理解。我们使用可能性生成和评估任务，研究了人们如何从否定复合陈述（如非（A 和 B）和非（A 或 B））中进行可能性推理。我们从心理模型理论中推导出 4 种不同的否定策略（枚举否定、排除否定、元素否定和子句否定），以预测从非（A 和 B）和非（A 或 B）进行可能性推理的相对难度。三项实验的结果一致表明，从非（A 或 B）进行可能性推理比从非（A 和 B）进行更难。此外，将否定解释为复合陈述所允许的可能性集合的补集与非（A 和 B）的结果一致，而不是非（A 或 B）。整体结果支持子句否定策略优于其他策略。
