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12Explanation and Evidence in Informal ArgumentCognitive Science 24 (4): 573-604. 2000.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 psychologica…Read more
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53Rebooting the bootstrap argument: Two puzzles for bootstrap theories of concept developmentBehavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (3): 145. 2011.The Origin of Concepts sets out an impressive defense of the view that children construct entirely new systems of concepts. We offer here two questions about this theory. First, why doesn't the bootstrapping process provide a pattern for translating between the old and new systems, contradicting their claimed incommensurability? Second, can the bootstrapping process properly distinguish meaning change from belief change?
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1ReasoningIn William Bechtel & George Graham (eds.), A Companion to Cognitive Science, Blackwell. 2017.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 b…Read more
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23Norms, competence, and the explanation of reasoningBehavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3): 501. 1983.
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232How do we regard fictional people? How do they regard us?Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. forthcoming.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 (“Conside…Read more
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1273Conditionals, Context, and the Suppression EffectCognitive Science 41 (3): 540-589. 2017.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 …Read more
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64Explanation and Evidence in Informal ArgumentCognitive Science 24 (4): 573-604. 2000.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 psychologica…Read more
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33Out of sorts? Some remedies for theories of object concepts: A reply to Rhemtulla and Xu (2007)Psychological Review 114 (4): 1096-1102. 2007.
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25Five-month-old infants have expectations for the accumulation of nonsolid substancesCognition 175 (C): 1-10. 2018.
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41Structure and process in semantic memory: A featural model for semantic decisionsPsychological Review 81 (3): 214-241. 1974.
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92Identity, Causality, and Pronoun AmbiguityTopics in Cognitive Science 6 (4): 663-680. 2014.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 likel…Read more
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28Split identity: Intransitive judgments of the identity of objectsCognition 119 (3): 356-373. 2011.Identity is a transitive relation, according to all standard accounts. Necessarily, if x = y and y = z, then x = z. However, people sometimes say that two objects, x and z, are the same as a third, y, even when x and z have different properties (thus, x = y and y = z, but x ≠ z). In the present experiments, participants read stories about an iceberg that breaks into two icebergs, one to the east and the other to the west. Many participants (32–54%, in baseline conditions across experiments) deci…Read more
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75The current status of research on concept combinationMind and Language 10 (1-2): 72-104. 1995.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 informa…Read more
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66Two causal theories of counterfactual conditionalsCognitive Science 34 (2): 175-221. 2010.Bayes nets are formal representations of causal systems that many psychologists have claimed as plausible mental representations. One purported advantage of Bayes nets is that they may provide a theory of counterfactual conditionals, such as If Calvin had been at the party, Miriam would have left early. This article compares two proposed Bayes net theories as models of people's understanding of counterfactuals. Experiments 1-3 show that neither theory makes correct predictions about backtracking…Read more
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16Set-theoretic and network models reconsidered: A comment on Hollan's "Features and semantic memory."Psychological Review 82 (2): 156-157. 1975.
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37Qualities and relations in folk theories of mindBehavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1): 75-76. 1993.
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14Paralogical reasoning: Evans, Johnson-Laird, and Byrne on liar and truth-teller puzzlesCognition 36 (3): 291-314. 1990.
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70Inference and Explanation in Counterfactual ReasoningCognitive Science 37 (6): 1107-1135. 2013.This article reports results from two studies of how people answer counterfactual questions about simple machines. Participants learned about devices that have a specific configuration of components, and they answered questions of the form “If component X had not operated [failed], would component Y have operated?” The data from these studies indicate that participants were sensitive to the way in which the antecedent state is described—whether component X “had not operated” or “had failed.” Ans…Read more
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124From numerical concepts to concepts of numberBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (6): 623-642. 2008.Many experiments with infants suggest that they possess quantitative abilities, and many experimentalists believe that these abilities set the stage for later mathematics: natural numbers and arithmetic. However, the connection between these early and later skills is far from obvious. We evaluate two possible routes to mathematics and argue that neither is sufficient: (1) We first sketch what we think is the most likely model for infant abilities in this domain, and we examine proposals for extr…Read more
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80Inductive judgments about natural categoriesJournal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 14 (6): 665-681. 1975.The present study examined the effects of semantic structure on simple inductive judgments about category members. For a particular category, subjects were told that one of the species had a given property and were asked to estimate the proportion of instances in the other species that possessed the property. The results indicated that category structure—in particular, the typicality of the species—influenced subjects' judgments. These results were interpreted by models based on the following as…Read more
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54Goals for a theory of deduction: Reply to Johnson-Laird (review)Minds and Machines 7 (3): 409-424. 1997.
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58Dissonances in theories of number understandingBehavioral and Brain Sciences 31 (6): 671-687. 2008.Traditional theories of how children learn the positive integers start from infants' abilities in detecting the quantity of physical objects. Our target article examined this view and found no plausible accounts of such development. Most of our commentators appear to agree that no adequate developmental theory is presently available, but they attempt to hold onto a role for early enumeration. Although some defend the traditional theories, others introduce new basic quantitative abilities, new me…Read more