Conditional Reasoning: Scenario or context effects

Abstract

This paper study the importance of contextual factors in reasoning with conditional inference tasks. In this experiment subjects were given conditional sentences in the context of narrative texts, Short stories about scenarios of the daily life were described in this texts. The experiment manipulated: a) context (causal or promises/threats), b) degree of factual relation between antecedent and consequent of conditional (deterministic, probabilistic or without relation), c) congruence between the factual consequence explicit in the story and the logic conclusion and d) conditional rules. The results were related to previous investigations about syllogistic inference (Valiña & de Vega, 1988; Valiña, 1988)and conditional reasoning (Seoane & Valiña, 1988) and were discussed within the framework of theoretical models about pragmatic reasoning.