Niki Pfeifer

Conditionals are central to inference. Before people can draw inferences about a natural language conditional, they must interpret its meaning. We investigated interpretation of uncertain conditionals using a probabilistic truth table task, focussing on (i) conditional event, (ii) material conditional, and (iii) conjunction interpretations. The order of object (shape) and feature (color) in each conditional's antecedent and consequent was varied between participants. The conditional event was the dominant interpretation, followed by conjunction, and took longer to process than conjunction (mean dierence 500 ms). Material conditional responses were rare. The proportion of conditional event responses increased from around 40% at the beginning of the task to nearly 80% at the end, with 55% of participants showing a qualitative shift of interpretation. Shifts to the conditional event occurred later in the feature-object order than in the object-feature order. We discuss the results in terms of insight and suggest implications for theories of interpretation.

A system of intermediate quantifiers (“Most S are P”, “m/n S are P”) is proposed for evaluating the rationality of human syllogistic reasoning. Some relations between intermediate quantifiers and probabilistic interpretations are discussed. The paper concludes by the generalization of the atmosphere, matching and conversion hypothesis to syllogisms with intermediate quantifiers. Since our experiments are currently still running, most of the paper is theoretical and intended to stimulate psychological studies.

Nonmonotonic conditionals (A |∼ B) are formalizations of common sense expressions of the form “if A, normally B”. The nonmonotonic conditional is interpreted by a “high” coherent conditional probability, P(B|A) > .5. Two important properties are closely related to the nonmonotonic conditional: First, A |∼ B allows for exceptions. Second, the rules of the nonmonotonic system p guiding A |∼ B allow for withdrawing conclusions in the light of new premises. This study reports a series of three experiments on reasoning with inference rules about nonmonotonic conditionals in the framework of coherence. We investigated the cut, and the right weakening rule of system p. As a critical condition, we investigated basic monotonic properties of classical (monotone) logic, namely monotonicity, transitivity, and contraposition. The results suggest that people reason nonmonotonically rather than monotonically. We propose nonmonotonic reasoning as a competence model of human reasoning

Traditionally, syllogisms are arguments with two premises and one conclusion which are constructed by propositions of the form “All… are…” and “At least one… is…” and their respective negated versions. Unfortunately, the practical use of traditional syllogisms is quite restricted. On the one hand, the “All…” propositions are too strict, since a single counterexample suffices for falsification. On the other hand, the “At least one …” propositions are too weak, since a single example suffices for verification. The present contribution studies algebraic interpretations of syllogisms with comparative quantifiers (e.g., “Most… are…”) and quantitative quantifiers (e.g., “n/m… are…”, “all, except n… are…”). This modern version of syllogistics is intended to be a more adequate framework for argumentation theory than traditional syllogistics.

Nonmonotonic conditionals (A |∼ B) are formalizations of common sense expressions of the form “if A, normally B”. The nonmonotonic conditional is interpreted by a “high” coherent conditional probability, P(B|A) > .5. Two important properties are closely related to the nonmonotonic conditional: First, A |∼ B allows for exceptions. Second, the rules of the nonmonotonic system p guiding A |∼ B allow for withdrawing conclusions in the light of new premises. This study reports a series of three experiments on reasoning with inference rules about nonmonotonic conditionals in the framework of coherence. We investigated the cut, and the right weakening rule of system p. As a critical condition, we investigated basic monotonic properties of classical (monotone) logic, namely monotonicity, transitivity, and contraposition. The results suggest that people reason nonmonotonically rather than monotonically. We propose nonmonotonic reasoning as a competence model of human reasoning.

This chapter presents a probability logical approach to fallacies. A special interpretation of (subjective) probability is used, which is based on coherence. Coherence provides not only a foundation of probability theory, but also a normative standard of reference for distinguishing fallacious from non-fallacious arguments. The violation of coherence is sufficient for an argument to be fallacious. The inherent uncertainty of everyday life argumentation is captured by attaching degrees of belief to the premises. Probability logic analyzes the structure of the argument and deduces the uncertainty of the conclusion from the premises. The approach is illustrated by prominent examples of fallacies, like the argumentum ad ignorantiam, affirming the consequent and the conjunction fallacy

According to probabilistic theories of reasoning in psychology, people's degree of belief in an indicative conditional `if A, then B' is given by the conditional probability, P(B|A). The role of language pragmatics is relatively unexplored in the new probabilistic paradigm. We investigated how consequent relevance aects participants' degrees of belief in conditionals about a randomly chosen card. The set of events referred to by the consequent was either a strict superset or a strict subset of the set of events referred to by the antecedent. We manipulated whether the superset was expressed using a disjunction or a hypernym. We also manipulated the source of the dependency, whether in long-term memory or in the stimulus. For subset-consequent conditionals, patterns of responses were mostly conditional probability followed by conjunction. For superset-consequent conditionals, conditional probability responses were most common for hypernym dependencies and least common for disjunction dependencies, which were replaced with responses indicating inferred consequent irrelevance. Conditional probability responses were also more common for knowledge-based than stimulus-based dependencies. We suggest