Event: Linguistics Circle Event
Date: 10 November 2021
Time: 12:00 noon - 13:00
Venue: Online
The Linguistics Circle Seminar entitled Repugnant validities – the case of disjunction introduction will be held on Wednesday 10 November 2021 at 12:00 noon. The speaker is Mr Paul Marty from UCL
To register for this event contact Ms Jessica Formosa and you will receive a Zoom link to the event.
Abstract
Research on human reasoning has identified various cases where our capacity to reason seems prone to systematic 'failures'. These failures can in principle stem from two distinct sources. Human reasoning might simply not follow the normative standards of classical-logical validity (a.o., Tversky & Kahneman 1974, Braine & O’Brien 1998, Walsh & Johnson-Laird, 2004). Alternatively, what looks like reasoning failures might instead be the result of perfectly sound reasoning acting on implicit, yet predictable enriched interpretations of the premises and/or conclusion (a.o., Mascarenhas & Koralus 2017, Mascarenhas & Picat 2019).
In this talk, Mr Paul Marty will report on a series of experiments investigating the interplay between reasoning proper and interpretive processes using inferences to disjunctive-like elements (e.g., concluding John visited Paris or London from John visited London). In their basic form, these deductive problems involve disjunctive conclusions which are robustly rejected by naïve subjects despite being classically valid. Results evidence that the driving force behind people’s rejection of these conclusions is in fact a multiplicity of conflicting pragmatic inferences. On the theoretical side, Paul Maty will argue that these findings align with the predictions from state-of-the-art theories of scalar implicatures and further demonstrate the role of pragmatic considerations in standard reasoning tasks. On the methodological side, he will present two novel paradigms permitting to attenuate the impact of pragmatics in such tasks, making people in effect 'more logical'.
In this talk, Mr Paul Marty will report on a series of experiments investigating the interplay between reasoning proper and interpretive processes using inferences to disjunctive-like elements (e.g., concluding John visited Paris or London from John visited London). In their basic form, these deductive problems involve disjunctive conclusions which are robustly rejected by naïve subjects despite being classically valid. Results evidence that the driving force behind people’s rejection of these conclusions is in fact a multiplicity of conflicting pragmatic inferences. On the theoretical side, Paul Maty will argue that these findings align with the predictions from state-of-the-art theories of scalar implicatures and further demonstrate the role of pragmatic considerations in standard reasoning tasks. On the methodological side, he will present two novel paradigms permitting to attenuate the impact of pragmatics in such tasks, making people in effect 'more logical'.