{"pk":25638,"title":"Illusory inferences: disjunctions, indefinites, and the erotetic theory of reasoning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Work in the mental model tradition has shown that human\nreasoners are subject to fallacious inferences from very simple\npremises that have been described as tantamount to cognitive\nillusions (Walsh & Johnson-Laird, 2004; Khemlani &\nJohnson-Laird, 2009). We present four experiments that show\nthat these phenomena are much more general and systematic\nthan has previously been thought. Among other results, we\nfind that premises using ‘some’ mirror premises using ‘or’\nin generating fallacious inferences, showing that there are interesting\nfacts about reasoning with quantifiers beyond syllogisms\nthat have been the main focus in the literature. Neither\nmental model theory nor other familiar theories of reasoning\naccount for the results we present. However, the novel illusory\ninferences we present are predicted by the erotetic theory of\nreasoning (Koralus and Mascarenhas, 2013). The key idea is\nthat, by default, we reason by interpreting successive premises\nas questions and maximally strong answers to those questions,\nwhich generates the observed fallacies","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"illusory inferences; disjunction; quantifiers;\nerotetic theory; reasoning; mental models; fallacies"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1ft528sw","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Salvador","middle_name":"","last_name":"Mascarenhas","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Oxford","department":""},{"first_name":"Philipp","middle_name":"","last_name":"Koralus","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Oxford","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25638/galley/15262/download/"}]}