Thompson V A
Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada.
Mem Cognit. 1994 Nov;22(6):742-58. doi: 10.3758/bf03209259.
Two experiments examined the role of necessity and sufficiency relationships in conditional reasoning. The results indicated that perceived necessity and sufficiency predicted variability in reasoning performance for four pragmatic relations (permission, obligation, causation, and definition), for both determinant and indeterminant syntactic forms, and for both a conditional arguments and a truth table evaluation task, as well as when the temporal relationship between the antecedent and consequent events was reversed. These data support the general utility of perceived necessity and sufficiency in the interpretation and evaluation of conditional relationships. However, the effects of necessity and sufficiency were smaller for reversed than for forward statements, which suggests that necessity/sufficiency-based interpretations may be more useful for evaluating some types of conditional relations than others. In addition, people were more likely to accept valid rather than invalid arguments, regardless of necessity/sufficiency relations, a finding that suggests that abstract, content-free representations may play a functional role in conditional reasoning.
两项实验研究了必要性和充分性关系在条件推理中的作用。结果表明，对于四种语用关系（许可、义务、因果关系和定义），无论是决定性还是非决定性句法形式，无论是在条件论证任务还是真值表评估任务中，以及当前提事件和结果事件之间的时间关系颠倒时，感知到的必要性和充分性都能预测推理表现的变异性。这些数据支持了感知到的必要性和充分性在解释和评估条件关系方面的普遍效用。然而，必要性和充分性对颠倒陈述的影响比对正向陈述的影响要小，这表明基于必要性/充分性的解释可能对评估某些类型的条件关系比其他关系更有用。此外，无论必要性/充分性关系如何，人们更有可能接受有效的而非无效的论证，这一发现表明抽象的、无内容的表征可能在条件推理中发挥功能性作用。
