Lance Rips

Beginning at least with Bach (1986), semanticists have suggested that objects are formally parallel to events in the way substances are formally parallel to processes. This chapter investigates whether these parallels can be understood to reflect a shared representational format in cognition, which underlies aspects of the intuitive metaphysics of these categories. The authors of this chapter hypothesized that a way of counting (atomicity) is necessary for object and event representations, unlike for substance or process representations. Atomicity is strongly implied by plural but not mass language. The chapter investigates the language–perception interface across these domains using minimally different images and animations, designed either to encourage atomicity (‘natural’ breaks) or to discourage it (‘unnatural’ breaks). The experiments test preference for naming such stimuli with mass or count syntax. The results support Bach’s analogy in perception and highlight the formal role of atomicity in object and event representation.

Some prominent cognitive theories have adopted an intriguing idea from metaphysics: The conditions of identity and individuation of objects come from the meaning of sortal nouns—count nouns, such as “dog” or “cup.” According to this sortalist theory, Rover’s identity over time and his distinctness from Fido depend on the meaning of “dog.” This chapter first describes the sortalist view in metaphysics (section 11.1) and then traces the ways in which cognitive psychologists have adapted and modified this theory in an attempt to explain empirical data—people’s judgments about the nature of objects (section 11.2). Sections 11.3 and 11.4 then examine some recent work in philosophy and psychology, arguing that these findings raise two related, but distinct, worries for sortalism as a psychological theory (which is here called psychosortalism). Finally, section 11.5 assesses whether any of the original metaphysics can survive within the best cognitive theories of object concepts.

Although people can recognize and make deductively valid arguments on occasion, one perspective is that there might be no psychologically valid distinction between the deductive correctness of a conclusion and its inductive strength. This perspective is called reasoning imperialism: the attempts of one theoretical camp to assimilate the data explained by another. This chapter shows that an element crucial to extending a mental models theory of deduction to handle inductive-strength judgments is unavailable, namely, the specification of constraints on what counts as relevant counterexamples to the inductive inference under consideration. It is argued that reasoning imperialism may not work for deduction and induction, for people may hold different sorts of arguments to different sorts of standards and evaluate them in qualitatively different sorts of ways.

Understanding novel phrases (e.g. upside‐down daisy) and classifying objects in categories named by phrases ought to have common properties, but you'd never know it from current theories. The best candidate for both jobs is the Theory Theory, but it faces difficulties when theories are impoverished. A potential solution is a dual approach that couples theories (representations‐about categories) with fixed mentalese expressions (representations‐of categories). Both representations combine information in parallel when understanding phrases. Although there are objections to the notion that theories can combine, some of them lose their force when applied to a suitable dual model.

Lines of Thought addresses how we are able to think about abstract possibilities: How can we think about math, despite the immateriality of numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities? How are we able to think about what might have happened if history had taken a different turn? Questions like these turn up in nearly every part of cognitive science, and they are central to our human position of having only limited knowledge concerning what is or might be true. Because we cannot experience hypothetical or future events or abstract concepts, we cannot use our ordinary sense of perception or memory to think about these subjects, so what underlies our ability to make these assumptions? Lance Rips explores people's beliefs about possibilities as they arise in the context of basic concepts, including numbers, causality, and reasons. He argues that beliefs about these concepts cannot be meaningfully reduced to perceptual information, remembered instances, or probabilities. He also claims that analogies to cognitive perception models are equally unhelpful in understanding what makes thinking of possibilities possible. Instead, he makes the case that our abilities here depend on the intrinsic hardwiring of the human mind. Lines of Thought provides an overview and a point of view on research in higher-level cognitive science, integrating theories from psychology, philosophy, and linguistics. The book is written in an accessible style that will provide students with essential background for their own thoughts about this domain.

This article looks at the way people determine the antecedent of a pronoun in sentence pairs, such as: Albert invited Ron to dinner. He spent hours cleaning the house. The experiment reported here is motivated by the idea that such judgments depend on reasoning about identity . Because the identity of an individual over time depends on the causal-historical path connecting the stages of the individual, the correct antecedent will also depend on causal connections. The experiment varied how likely it is that the event of the first sentence would cause the event of the second for each of the two individuals . Decisions about the antecedent followed causal likelihood. A mathematical model of causal identity accounted for most of the key aspects of the data from the individual sentence pairs

There has been a call for a potentially revolutionary change to our existing understanding of the psychological concept of personal identity. Apparently, people can psychologically represent people, including themselves, as multiple individuals at the same time. Here we ask whether the intransitive judgments found in these studies truly reflect the operation of an intransitive concept of personal identity. We manipulate several factors that arbitrate between transitivity and intransitivity and find most support for transitivity: in contrast to prior work, most participants do not make intransitive judgments when there is any reason to favor one individual over another. People change which single individual they personally identify with, depending on which individual competes more strongly or weakly for identity, rather than identifying with both individuals. Even when two individuals are identical and therefore both entitled to be the same person, we find that people make more transitive judgments once they understand the practical commitments of their responses (Experiment 4), and report not being able to actually imagine two perspectives simultaneously when reasoning about the scenario (Experiment 5). In short, we suggest that while people may make intransitive judgments, these do not reflect that they psychologically represent identity in an intransitive manner.

In this paper, we report results from experiments in which people read conversational arguments and then judge the convincingness of each claim and the individual speakers' burden of proof. The results showed an "anti-primacy" effect: People judge the speaker who makes the first claim as having greater burden of proof. This effect persists even when each speaker's claims are rated equally convincing. We also find that people rate claims less convincing when they appear in the first part of an argument than when they appear in isolation.

Our knowledge of natural categories includes beliefs not only about what is true of them but also about what would be true if the categories had properties other than (or in addition to) their actual ones. Evidence about these beliefs comes from three lines of research: experiments on category-based induction, on hypothetical transformations of category members, and on definitions of kind terms. The 1st part of this article examines results and theories arising from each of these research streams. The 2nd part considers possible unified theories for this domain, including theories based on ideals and norms. It also contrasts 2 broad frameworks for modal category information: one focusing on beliefs about intrinsic or essential properties, the other focusing on interacting causal relations.

To a first approximation, cognitive science agrees with everyday notions about reasoning: According to both views, reasoning is a special sort of relation between beliefs – a relation that holds when accepting (or rejecting) one or more beliefs causes others to be accepted (rejected). If you learn, for example, that everyone dislikes iguana pudding, that should increase the likelihood of your believing that Calvin, in particular, dislikes iguana pudding. Reasoning could produce an entirely new belief about Calvin's attitude toward the pudding, or it could modify an old one. In either case, accepting the second idea on the basis of the first exemplifies reasoning of the simplest sort. More complex reasoning results from chains of such changes. (Café Maudit serves everything Calvin dislikes. So, since everybody dislikes iguana pudding, Calvin does; since Calvin does, Café Maudit serves it.)

Readers assume that commonplace properties of the real world also hold in realistic fiction. They believe, for example, that the usual physical laws continue to apply. But controversy exists in theories of fiction about whether real individuals exist in the story’s world. Does Queen Victoria exist in the world of Jane Eyre, even though Victoria is not mentioned in it? The experiments we report here find that when participants are prompted to consider the world of a fictional individual (“Consider the world of Jane Eyre…”), they are willing to say that a real individual (e.g., Queen Victoria) can exist in the same world. But when participants are prompted to consider the world of a real individual, they are less willing to say that a fictional individual can exist in that world. The asymmetry occurs when we ask participants both if a real person is in the character’s world and if the person would appear there. However, the effect is subject to spatial and temporal constraints. When the person and the character share spatial and temporal settings, interchange is more likely to occur. These results shed light on the author’s implicit contract with the reader, which can license the reader to augment a fictional world with features that the author only implicates as part of the work’s background.

Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B. Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional as a context-sensitive strict conditional: true if and only if its consequent is true in each of a contextually determined set of situations in which its antecedent is true. Pragmatically, the theory claims that context changes in response to new assertions, including new conditional premises. Thus, the conclusion of a modus ponens argument may no longer be accepted in the changed context. Psychologically, the theory describes people as capable of reasoning about broad classes of possible situations, ordered by typicality, without having to reason about individual possible worlds. The theory accounts for the main suppression phenomena, and it generates some novel predictions that new experiments confirm.

A substantial body of evidence shows that people tend to rely too heavily on explanations when trying to justify an opinion. Some research suggests these errors may arise from an inability to distinguish between explanations and the evidence that bears upon them. We examine an alternative account, that many people do distinguish between explanations and evidence, but rely more heavily on unsubstantiated explanations when evidence is scarce or absent. We examine the philosophical and psychological distinctions between explanation and evidence, and show that participants use explanations as a substitute for missing evidence. Experiment 1 replicates the results of other researchers, but further shows that participants generate more evidence when they are not constrained by their lack of data. Merely mentioning a source of data can alter both their evaluation (Experiment 2) and their production (Experiment 3) of explanations and evidence. In Experiment 4, we show that participants can explicitly consider the availability of evidence and other pragmatic factors when evaluating arguments. Finally, we consider the implications of using explanations to replace missing evidence as a strategy in argument.