48 documents found, page 1 of 5
Reasoning from quantified modal premises
Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Rasga, Célia; Johnson‐Laird, P. N.People tend to conclude: Paulo is possibly a businessman (Experiment 1). It seems plausible, and itfollows from an intuitive mental model in which Paulo is one of a set of artists who are businessmen.Further deliberation can yield a model of an alternative possibility in which Paulo is not one of theartists, which confirms that the conclusion is only a possibility. The snag is that standard modal logics,which de...
40th Anniversary of Mental Models Theory
Quelhas, Ana CristinaIn 2023, on July 21 and 22, a meeting was organised in honour of Phil Johnson-Laird, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the mental model theory, at the University College London. This book collects the testimonies of many fellow colleagues who wanted to celebrate these dates, and it shows that Phil Johnson-Laird is a unique personality.
An explanation of or-deletions and other paradoxical disjunctive inferences
Rasga, Célia; Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Johnson-Laird, P. N.Some inferences of the sort: A or B; therefore A, which are invalid in standard logics, are sensible in life: You can enter now or later; therefore, you can enter now. That these "or-deletions" follow necessarily or only possibly is a by-product of a theory of mental models. Its semantics for "or" refers to conjunctions of possibilities holding in default of knowledge to the contrary. It predicts new sorts of o...
Conditional content, explicit information and generating cases: Sources for sup...
Gómez-Sánchez, Jesica; Moreno, Sergio Moreno; Couto, Marta; Quelhas, Ana CristinaIn the present study, we evaluate the suppression effect by asking participants to make inferences with everyday conditionals ("if A, then B"; "if Ana finds a friend, then she will go to the theatre"), choosing between three possible conclusions ("she went to the theatre"; "she did not go to the theatre"; "it cannot be concluded"). We test how these inferences can be influenced by three factors: a) when the con...
The mental model theory of free choice permissions and paradoxical disjunctive ...
Laird, Jennifer Ann; Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Rasga, CéliaInferences of the sort: A or B; therefore A, are invalid. Yet, the paradoxes of free choice are acceptable: You can have sole or lobster; so, you can have sole. Pragmatic theories attempt to save logic. A semantic theory of human reasoning is founded on mental models of possibilities. “Or” refers to a conjunction of possibilities that each hold in default of knowledge to the contrary. A disjunction: it is permi...
The relation between factual and counterfactual conditionals
Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Rasga, Célia Maria Batalha Silva; Johnson-Laird, Philip N.What is the relation between factual conditionals: If A happened then B happened, and counterfactual conditionals: If A had happened then B would have happened? Some theorists propose quite different semantics for the two. In contrast, the theory of mental models and its computer implementation interrelates them. It postulates that both can have a priori truth values, and that the semantic bases of both are pos...
The relation between factual and counterfactual conditionals
Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Rasga, Célia; Johnson-Laird, P. N.What is the relation between factual conditionals: If A happened then B happened, and counterfactual conditionals: If A had happened then B would have happened? Some theorists propose quite different semantics for the two. In contrast, the theory of mental models and its computer implementation interrelates them. It postulates that both can have a priori truth values, and that the semantic bases of both are pos...
A priori true and false conditionals
Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Rasga, Célia Maria Batalha Silva; Johnson-Laird, Philip N.The theory of mental models postulates that meaning and knowledge can modulate the interpretation of conditionals. The theory's computer implementation implied that certain conditionals should be true or false without the need for evidence. Three experiments corroborated this prediction. In Experiment 1, nearly 500 participants evaluated 24 conditionals as true or false, and they justified their judgments by co...
How children with autism reason about other's intentions: False-belief and coun...
Rasga, Célia Maria Batalha Silva; Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Byrne, Ruth M. J.We examine false belief and counterfactual reasoning in children with autism with a new change-of-intentions task. Children listened to stories, for example, Anne is picking up toys and John hears her say she wants to find her ball. John goes away and the reason for Anne's action changes-Anne's mother tells her to tidy her bedroom. We asked, 'What will John believe is the reason that Anne is picking up toys?' w...
Advice conditionals about tips and warnings: Interpretations and inferences
Couto, Marta Barley de La Cueva; Quelhas, Ana Cristina; Byrne, Ruth M. J.Two experiments examine how people interpret and reason about advice conditionals, such as tips, for example, “if you study more your grades will improve”, and warnings, for example, “if you stop exercising you will gain weight”. Experiment 1 showed that when participants reason about whether a tip or warning could be true in different situations, their judgments correspond to a biconditional or conditional int...