The role of content and context in pragmatic reasoning

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to study pragmatic reasoning in conditional inference tasks. Two experiments were performed in which the subjects ought to choose among alternative responses, rating their confidence in their choice. The linguistic form of sentences (“if…then” or “whenever…then”) and the negativity of antecedent vs. consequent were manipulated in the first experiment, with formal content. The second experiment, with thematic content, manipulated the context or scenario of the problem (causal, temporal or promises/threats) and the probability of factual relation between antecedent and consequent of conditional sentence (deterministic, probabilistic, without relation). The results were discussed within the framework of the theoretical approaches for human reasoning based upon mental scenarios