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 t…
Read moreAccording 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