Reasoning counterfactually: making inferences about things that didn't happen. 2002

Valerie A Thompson, and Ruth M J Byrne
Department of Psychology, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada. valerie.thompson@usask.ca

The authors investigated the relationship between reasoners' understanding of subjunctive conditionals (e.g., if p had happened, then q would have happened) and the inferences they were prepared to endorse. Reasoners who made a counterfactual interpretation of subjunctive statements (i.e., they judged the statement to imply that p and q did not happen) endorsed different inferences than those who did not. Those who made a counterfactual interpretation were more likely to (a) judge the situation in which p and q occurred to be inconsistent with the conditional statement and (b) make negative inferences such as modus tollens (i.e., approximately q therefore approximately p). These findings occurred with familiar and unfamiliar content, affirmative and negative conditionals, and conditional and biconditional relations.

UI MeSH Term Description Entries
D008128 Logic The science that investigates the principles governing correct or reliable inference and deals with the canons and criteria of validity in thought and demonstration. This system of reasoning is applicable to any branch of knowledge or study. (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, 2d ed & Sippl, Computer Dictionary, 4th ed) Logics
D008297 Male Males
D008875 Middle Aged An adult aged 45 - 64 years. Middle Age
D011340 Problem Solving A learning situation involving more than one alternative from which a selection is made in order to attain a specific goal.
D011578 Psycholinguistics A discipline concerned with relations between messages and the characteristics of individuals who select and interpret them; it deals directly with the processes of encoding (phonetics) and decoding (psychoacoustics) as they relate states of messages to states of communicators. Psycholinguistic
D011932 Reading Acquiring information from text.
D003210 Concept Formation A cognitive process involving the formation of ideas generalized from the knowledge of qualities, aspects, and relations of objects. Concept Acquisition,Concept Learning,Conceptualization,Acquisition, Concept,Acquisitions, Concept,Concept Acquisitions,Formation, Concept,Learning, Concept
D005260 Female Females
D006801 Humans Members of the species Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens,Man (Taxonomy),Human,Man, Modern,Modern Man
D000293 Adolescent A person 13 to 18 years of age. Adolescence,Youth,Adolescents,Adolescents, Female,Adolescents, Male,Teenagers,Teens,Adolescent, Female,Adolescent, Male,Female Adolescent,Female Adolescents,Male Adolescent,Male Adolescents,Teen,Teenager,Youths

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