36 - Presupposition, Attention, and Why-Questions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
Philosophers and psychologists share an interest in understanding the everyday activity of explaining, which I take up as it intersects pragmatics and reasoning. How does the distinction between the focus and the presuppositions of why-questions orient or bias answers to those questions and what are the implications for conclusions drawn of systematic errors and fallacies, particularly in how subjects respond to why-questions about chance phenomena?
The pragmatics perspective is usually construed as an attempt to show that the experimenter's presentation misleads subjects with the implication that the experimenter's ascription of errors and fallacies is not warranted. Schwarz (1996), in a book extending research on pragmatic influences on experimental judgments, writes in an introductory chapter:
Research participants …have no reason to suspect that the researcher is not a cooperative communicator and are hence likely to find meaning in the researcher's contributions.
The findings reviewed in the following chapters suggest that this basic misunderstanding about the cooperative nature of the communication in research settings has contributed to some of the more puzzling findings in social and psychological research and is, in part, responsible for the less than flattering picture of human judgmental abilities that has emerged from psychological research.
(1996: 5)The role of pragmatics that I explore is related, but it leads to a different, although strictly compatible, conclusion. Pragmatics contributes to explaining subjects' responses. But the contribution I follow out supports ascriptions of erroneous reasoning. I take for granted that explaining is not justifying.
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- ReasoningStudies of Human Inference and its Foundations, pp. 748 - 764Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008
References
Abraham, C. (1988) “The Connection in Lay Causal Comprehension: A Return to Heider.” In Hilton (1988): 145–175.
, , , and (1995) “The Role of Covariation versus Mechanism Information in Causal Attribution.” Cognition 54: 299–352.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, and (2005) Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment (Oxford: Oxford University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and (1983) “The Psychological Causality Implicit in Language.” Cognition 14: 237–273.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Brown, P., and Levinson, S. (1978) “Universals in Language Usage: Politeness Phenomena.” In , ed. Questions and PolitenessCambridge: Cambridge University Press: 56–311.Google Scholar
, and (1981) “From Words to Meaning: A Semantic Illusion.” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 20: 540–552.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, J. St. B. T., and Feeny, A. (2004) “The Role of Prior Belief in Reasoning.” In Leighton and Sternberg, eds.: 78–102.
, , and (1986) “The Effects of Statistical Training on Thinking about Everyday Problems.” Cognitive Psychology 18: 253–292.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(1987) “Errors and Mistakes: Evaluating the Accuracy of Social Judgment.” Psychological Bulletin 101: 75–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, , and (2002) Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(1988) “Logic and Causal Attribution.” In his Contemporary Science and Natural Explanation: 33–65.Google Scholar
. ed. (1988) Contemporary Science and Natural Explanation: Commonsense Conceptions of Causality (New York: New York University Press).Google Scholar
. (1990) “Conversational Processes and Causal Explanation.” Psychological Bulletin 107: 65–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and (2005) The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
, , and (1983) “Inductive Reasoning: Competence or Skill?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6: 494–501.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2005) Mental Models and Thought. In Holyoak and Morrison, eds.: 185–208.
, and (2005) “A Model of Heuristic Judgment.” In The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning: 267–293.Google Scholar
, and (2002) “Norm Theory: Comparing Reality to Its Alternatives.” In Heuristics and Biases, Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman, eds.: 348–366.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and , eds. (1982) Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1982a) “On the Psychology of Prediction.” In Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky, eds.: 48–68.
Kahneman, D and Tversky, A. (1982b) “Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness.” In Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky, eds.: 32–47.
Kahneman, D and Tversky, A. (1982c) “On the Study of Statistical Intuitions.” In Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky, eds.: 493–508.
, and (1972) “Resolving Ambiguity: Effects of Biasing Context in the Unattended Ear.” Cognition 1: 359–372.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levinson, S. C. (1995) “Interactional Biases in Human Thinking.” In , ed., Social Intelligence and InteractionCambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press 221–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(1983) “Scorekeeping in a Language-Game” in his Philosophical Papers Vol. I (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 233–249.Google Scholar
(1975) “Leading Questions and the Eyewitness Report.” Cognitive Psychology 7: 560–572.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(1972) “The How and What of Why: Some Determinants and Consequences of Causal Attribution.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 22: 171–193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(1989) “Context Effects in Judgments of Causation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57: 189–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, , , and (2002) “The Use of Statistical Heuristics in Everyday Inductive Reasoning.” In Heuristics and Biases, Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman, eds.: 510–533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, , , and (2001) “Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic vs. Analytic Cognition.” Psychological Review 108: 291–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, and (1980) Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall).Google Scholar
Reder, L. M., and Cleeremans, A. (1990) “The Role of Partial Matches in Comprehension: The Moses Illusion Revisited.” In and , eds., Inferences and Text Comprehension: The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 25 (San Diego, CA: Academic Press).Google Scholar
Rips, L. (2002) “Reasoning.” In (Series Ed.) and (Vol. Ed.), Stevens' Handbook of Experimental Psychology: Vol. 2. Cognition (third ed.). (New York: Wiley).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sloman, S. A. (2002) “Two Systems of Reasoning.” In Gilovich et al.: 379–396.CrossRef
, and (1986) Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).Google Scholar
, and (1999) “Discrepancies between Normative and Descriptive Models of Decision Making and the Understanding/Acceptance Principle.” Cognitive Psychology 38: 349–385.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, and (2004) “A Little Logic Goes a Long Way: Basing Experiment on Semantic Theory in the Cognitive Science of Conditional Reasoning.” Cognitive Science 28 (4): 481–529.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Turnbull, W., and Slugoski, B. R. (1988) “Conversational and Linguistic Processes in Causal Attribution.” In Hilton: 66–93.
, , , , and (2002) “Looking without Seeing the Background Change: Electrophysiological Correlates of Change Detection During Change Blindness.” Cognition 84: B1–B10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, and (1981) “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice.” Science 211: 454–458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
and . (1983/2002) “Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment.” In Gilovich, Griffin, and Kahneman, eds.: 19–48. (Original Psychological Review 91: 293–315.) (pp. 114–135, Chapter 6, this volume).Google Scholar
, and (2000) “Is ‘Change Blindness’ Attenuated by Domain-Specific Expertise?” Visual Cognition 7: 163–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
(2005) “Explanation as a Guide to Induction” Philosophers' Imprint, available at: www.philosophersimprint.org/005002/, 5: 1–29.Google Scholar
Accessibility standard: Unknown
Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown
and may be updated in the future.