Meaning and Idealization in Reasoning Towards an Interpretation of Conditionals

Meaning and Idealization in Reasoning Towards an Interpretation of Conditionals: Is There a Singular Specific Meaning or Are There a Multitude of Ephemeral Interpretations of Natural Language Connectives, or Both?

The paper investigates the thesis that while the pragmatics of content and context can yield many interpretations, there is an idealized core-meaning for sentential connectives: People do not reason from this core meaning, but can reason towards a corresponding interpretation, i.e., the conditional interpretation akin to the much dis-reputed material implication of classic logic. In reasoning towards this conditional-interpretation of “if A then C”, the utterances are interpreted as meaning that all possibilities except the “A and not-c” contingency are possible. In idealizing towards the conditional interpretation as the core meaning 'if', theorists abstract, simplify and generalize across conditions. Six experiments show that when the context is idealized by taking account of cognitive processing hurdles and auxiliary hypothesis in the mental-models theory of reasoning (e.g., people tend not to throw away semantic information, they start reasoning on the basis of a minimal representation, they are sensitive to the principles of parsimony in positing theoretical entities, … ) people are more likely to reason towards a conditional interpretation. That is, the context induces people to reason towards a more idealized interpretation (which must not be an ideal interpretation). A series of developmental studies additionally indicates that with age (i.e., experience and education) people are more likely to reason towards the conditional interpretation and two individual-differences studies show that people higher in general ability are similarly more likely to reason towards the conditional interpretation.