Mental models explain how people reason about possibilities: Johnson-Laird & Ragni
- by Sunny Khemlani
- in News
- posted August 12, 2024
Phil Johnson-Laird and Marco Ragni present a new paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review on how people reason about possibilities. The present a theory that argues that a possibility, such as “it’s possible that she hid”, presupposes the possibility of its negation, i.e., that she didn’t hide. The theory treats both possibilities and their presuppositions as mental models. The abstract of the paper is available here:
Everyone reasons about possibilities. This article explains how they could do so using mental models. The theory makes four major claims: 1. Correct inferences are necessary, referring only to facts or possibilities to which the premises refer and not ruling any of them out, for example: She left or hid; Therefore, it’s possible that she left and possible that she hid. 2. A possibility such as that she hid, which is represented in an intuitive model, presupposes the possibility that it did not occur, she did not hide, which, if reasoners deliberate, is represented in the resulting model. 3. Reasoners condense consistent possibilities, such as the earlier pair, into one possibility: it is possible that she left and she hid. 4. Inconsistencies, such as she left or hid, and she neither left nor hid, refer to no possibilities whatsoever – they have an empty model – and so their only effects are local. Hence, any inference can be withdrawn with impunity if there is knowledge to the contrary. Experiments have corroborated each of these principles. They are incompatible with four essentials of standard modal logics, which concern deductions based on “possible” or “necessary”. Their formal deductions correspond to valid inferences, which have no counterexamples in which the premises are true but the conclusion is false. And so the article examines the diferences between the two approaches, and explores the adaptation of a modal logic to account for correct human reasoning. Its feasibility is an open question.