The interpretation of the concepts ‘necessity’ and ‘sufficiency’ in forward unicausal relations

La nécessité et la suffisance sont deux concepts centraux de la littérature consacrée au raisonnement causal. Trois expériences analysant la manière qu’ont les individus de comprendre ces deux concepts sont exposées dans cet article. Les résultats indiquent que la nécessité est une notion plus complexe que celle de suffisance. Pour la suffisance, les sujets vérifient seulement si la cause est suivie de l’effet, alors que pour la nécessité, deux possibilités peuvent être examinées:“la cause précède-t-elle toujours l’effet?”et “l’effet peut-il apparaître sans la cause ?”. Plus important encore, ces deux concepts manifestent une structure différente: la nécessité est considérée comme une propriété de type tout ou rien alors que la suffisance est vue comme une propriété plus graduelle. Les résultats soulignent l’utilité d’une opérationnalisation appropriée afin de mesurer la nécessité et la suffisance telles qu’elles sont perçues par les individus.Necessity and sufficiency are two central concepts in the literature on causal reasoning. Three experiments are reported that investigate how people understand these two concepts. It is found that necessity is more a complex notion than the notion of sufficiency. For sufficiency, people only verify whether the cause is always followed by the effect, whereas for necessity, there are two possibilities that can be verified: ‘does the cause always precede the effect’ and ‘can the effect occur without the cause’. More importantly, it is found that both concepts have a different structure: necessity is considered as an all-or-none property whereas sufficiency is a more liberal characteristic. The present findings highlight the need for an appropriate operationalisation for measuring the perceived necessity and sufficiency of given cause-effect relations

The interpretation of the concepts ‘necessity’ and ‘sufficiency’ in forward unicausal relations

La nécessité et la suffisance sont deux concepts centraux de la littérature consacrée au raisonnement causal. Trois expériences analysant la manière qu’ont les individus de comprendre ces deux concepts sont exposées dans cet article. Les résultats indiquent que la nécessité est une notion plus complexe que celle de suffisance. Pour la suffisance, les sujets vérifient seulement si la cause est suivie de l’effet, alors que pour la nécessité, deux possibilités peuvent être examinées:“la cause précède-t-elle toujours l’effet?”et “l’effet peut-il apparaître sans la cause ?”. Plus important encore, ces deux concepts manifestent une structure différente: la nécessité est considérée comme une propriété de type tout ou rien alors que la suffisance est vue comme une propriété plus graduelle. Les résultats soulignent l’utilité d’une opérationnalisation appropriée afin de mesurer la nécessité et la suffisance telles qu’elles sont perçues par les individus.Necessity and sufficiency are two central concepts in the literature on causal reasoning. Three experiments are reported that investigate how people understand these two concepts. It is found that necessity is more a complex notion than the notion of sufficiency. For sufficiency, people only verify whether the cause is always followed by the effect, whereas for necessity, there are two possibilities that can be verified: ‘does the cause always precede the effect’ and ‘can the effect occur without the cause’. More importantly, it is found that both concepts have a different structure: necessity is considered as an all-or-none property whereas sufficiency is a more liberal characteristic. The present findings highlight the need for an appropriate operationalisation for measuring the perceived necessity and sufficiency of given cause-effect relations

Development of Quantitative and Temporal Scalar Implicatures in a Felicity Judgment Task

Experimental investigations into children’s interpretation of scalar terms show that children have difficulties with scalar implicatures in tasks. In contrast with adults, they are for instance not able to derive the pragmatic interpretation that “some” means “not all” (Noveck, 2001; Papafragou and Musolino, 2003). However, there is also substantial experimental evidence that children are not incapable of drawing scalar inferences and that they are aware of the pragmatic potential of scalar expressions. In these kinds of studies, the prime interest is to discover what conditions facilitate implicature production for children. One of the factors that seem to be difficult for children is the generation of the scalar alternative. In a Felicity Judgment Task (FJT) the alternative is given. Participants are presented with a pair of utterances and asked to choose the most felicitous description. In such a task, even 5-year-old children are reported to show a very good performance. Our study wants to build on this tradition, by using a FJT where not only “some-all” choices are given, but also “some-many” and “many-all.” In combination with a manipulation of the number of successes/failures in the stories, this enabled us to construct control, critical and ambiguous items. We compared the performance of 59 5-year-old children with that of 34 11-year-old children. The results indicated that performance of both age groups was clearly above chance, replicating previous findings. However, for the 5-year-old children, the critical and ambiguous items were more difficult than the control items and they also performed worse on these two types of items than the 11-year-old children. Interestingly with respect to the issue of scalar diversity, the 11-year-old children were also presented temporal items, which turned out to be more difficult than the quantitative ones

The Understanding of Scalar Implicatures in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder: Dichotomized Responses to Violations of Informativeness

This study investigated the understanding of underinformative sentences like “Some elephants have trunks” by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scalar term ‘some’ can be interpreted pragmatically, ‘Not all elephants have trunks,’ or logically, ‘Some and possibly all elephants have trunks.’ Literature indicates that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures, i.e., they often interpret them pragmatically, as controls do. This contrasts with the traditional claim of difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains, and is more in line with the idea that pragmatic problems are not universal. The aim of this study was to: (a) gain insight in the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures, and (b) do this by assessing not only sensitivity to underinformativeness, but also different degrees of tolerance to violations of informativeness. We employed a classic statement-evaluation task, presenting optimal, logical false, and underinformative utterances. In Experiment 1, children had to express their judgment on a binary option ‘I agree’ vs. ‘I disagree.’ In Experiment 2, a ternary middle answer option ‘I agree a bit’ was also available. Sixty-six Flemish-speaking 10-year-old children were tested: 22 children with ASD, an IQ-matched group, and an age-matched group. In the binary judgment task, the ASD group gave more pragmatic answers than the other groups, which was significant in the mixed effects logistic regression analysis, although not in the non-parametric analysis. In the ternary judgment task, the children with ASD showed a dichotomized attitude toward the speaker’s meaning, by tending to either fully agree or fully disagree with underinformative statements, in contrast with TD children, who preferred the middle option. Remarkably, the IQ-matched group exhibited the same pattern of results as the ASD group. Thanks to a fine-grained measure such as the ternary judgment task, this study highlighted a neglected aspect of the pragmatic profile of ASD, whose struggle with social communication seems to affect also the domain of informativeness. We discuss the implications of the dichotomized reaction toward violations of informativeness in terms of the potential role of ASD and of cognitive and verbal abilities

Unless Reasoning

We report the results of two experiments investigating conditional inferences from conditional unless assertions, such as Juan is not in León unless Nuria is in Madrid. Experiments 1 and 2 check Fillenbaum’s hypothesis about the semantic similarity of unless with if not and only if assertions; both also examine inferential endorsements (Experiment 1) and endorsements and latencies (Experiment 2) of the four logically equivalent conditional formulations: if A then B, if not-B then not-A, A only if B and not- A unless B. The results of these experiments show the similarity of unless and only if, confirming that the representation of both conditionals from the outset probably include two possibilities directionally oriented from B to A; results also confirm the especial difficulty of unless assertions. The implications of the results are discussed in the context of recent psychological and linguistic theories of the meaning of unless.Se presentan los resultados de dos experimentos que investigan las inferencias a partir de enunciados condicionales a menos que, tales como “Juan no está en León a menos que Nuria esté en Madrid”. Los experimentos 1 y 2 comprueban la hipótesis de Fillenbaum sobre la similaridad semántica de los enunciados a menos que con si no y sólo si; ambos experimentos examinan las respuestas inferenciales (Experimento 1) y las respuestas inferenciales y las latencias (Experimento 2) de las cuatro formulaciones condicionales lógicamente equivalentes: si A entonces B, si no-B entonces no A, A sólo si B y no-A a menos que B. Los resultados muestran la similaridad de a menos que y sólo si, confirmando que la representación de ambos condicionales probablemente incluya desde el principio dos posibilidades orientadas direccionalmente desde B a A; los resultados también confirman la dificultad especial de las afirmaciones del tipo a menos que. Las implicaciones de los resultados se comentan en el contexto de las teorías psicológicas y lingüísticas sobre el significado de a menos que

Why Humans Fail in Solving the Monty Hall Dilemma: A Systematic Review

The Monty Hall dilemma (MHD) is a difficult brain teaser. We present a systematic review of literature published between January 2000 and February 2018 addressing why humans systematically fail to react optimally to the MHD or fail to understand it. Based on a sequential analysis of the phases in the MHD, we first review causes in each of these phases that may prohibit humans to react optimally and to fully understand the problem. Next, we address the question whether humans’ performance, in terms of choice behaviour and (probability) understanding, can be improved. Finally, we discuss individual differences related to people’s suboptimal performance. This review provides novel insights by means of its holistic approach of the MHD: At each phase, there are reasons to expect that people respond suboptimally. Given that the occurrence of only one cause is sufficient, it is not surprising that suboptimal responses are so widespread and people rarely understand the MHD

Children and Pragmatic Implicatures: A Test of the Pragmatic Tolerance Hypothesis with Different Tasks

status: publishe