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In recent literature, there is unanimous agreement about children’s pragmatic competence in drawing scalar implicatures about some, if the task is made easy enough. Children, however, accept infelicitous some sentences more often than adults do. In general, their acceptance is assumed to be synonymous with a logical interpretation of some as a quantifier. But in our view, an overlap with some as a determiner in underinformative sentences cannot be ruled out, given the ambiguity of the experimental instructions and the attitude of trust by children in adults. Our study investigated this hypothesis with different experimental manipulations. We found that when the experimenter’s intentions are clear (Experiment 1- all/some order effect, Experiments 2 and 4, conditions 2 and 3), underinformative sentences are usually rejected; otherwise (Experiment 1- some/all order effect, Experiment 3 and Experiment 4, control condition) they are accepted. However, analysis of verbal protocols indicated that pragmatically infelicitous sentences are accepted, with some interpreted mostly as a determiner, irrespective of the function of some as a quantifier. Acceptance is not in itself synonymous with a logical interpretation of some as a quantifier.

Newell, Mitchell, and Hayes (NMH) conduct three experiments designed to test whether exemplar cuing (EC) theory or a statistical format theory provides a more accurate account for how people make judgments about low-probability events. They report finding support for the statistical format theory and little or no support for EC. However, NMH misstate the requirements for the production of exemplars in EC theory. As a result, they confuse non-exemplar conditions with exemplar conditions in their experiments, and find results that are virtually irrelevant to EC theory. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Numerosi e recenti studi hanno mostrato l’importanza dell’approccio pragmatico e psicoretorico allo studio del pensiero, evidenziando come alcuni dei principali fenomeni tradizionalmente considerati come casi esemplari dei limiti del pensiero umano siano in realtà il risultato di sofisticati processi inferenziali di attribuzione di significato al testo dei problemi utilizzati. Il presente contributo prende in esame due casi paradigmatici di incoerenza decisionale, particolarmente rilevanti nelle scelte economiche: l’effetto disgiunzione (disjunction effect) e l’effetto cornice (framing effect). Attraverso un’analisi pragmatica dei problemi utilizzati e una loro conseguente riformulazione verrà mostrato come i fenomeni studiati, solitamente attribuiti a forme di irrazionalità dei processi decisionali, siano in realtà effetto di fattori pragmatici.

The disjunction effect (Tversky and Shafir in Psychol Sci 3:305-309, 1992) occurs when decision makers prefer option x (versus y) when knowing that event A occurs and also when knowing that event A does not occur, but they refuse x (or prefer y) when not knowing whether or not A occurs. This form of incoherence violates Savage's (Cognition 57:31-95, 1954) sure-thing principle, one of the basic axioms of the rational theory of decision-making. The phenomenon was attributed to a lack of clear reasons for accepting an option (x) when the subjects are under uncertainty. Through a pragmatic analysis of the task and a consequent reformulation of it, we show that the effect does not depend on the presence of uncertainty, but on the introduction into the text-problem of a non-relevant goal. © Fondazione Rosselli 2007.

The formulation of the conditional probability in classical tasks does not guarantee the effective transmission of the independence of the hit rate from the base rate. In these kinds of tasks, data are all available, but subjects are able to understand them in the specific meanings proper to a specialized language only if these are adequately transmitted. From this perspective, the partitive formulation should not be considered a facilitation, but rather, a way of effectively transmitting the conditional probability. © 2007 Cambridge University Press.

We run two studies to investigate the pragmatic dimension of the discourse involved in probabilistic tasks. The results of the first study indicate that the source of difficulty is related more to the structure of the text than to heuristic factors or the statistical format in which the probabilities are expressed. The results of the second study show that the difficulty of the "Marbles" problem (Johnson-Laird et al., 1999) depends on, again, the pragmatic dimension of the text-problem, and not on the failure to represent false cases nor on the numerosity of mental models.

The disjunction effect (Tversky & Shafir, 1992) occurs when decision makers prefer option x (versus y) when knowing that event A occurs and also when knowing that event A does not occur, but they refuse x (or prefer y) when not knowing whether or not A occurs. This form of incoherence violates Savage's (1954) sure-thing principle, one of the basic axioms of the rational theory of decision making. The phenomenon was attributed to a lack of clear reasons for accepting an option (x) when subjects are under uncertainty. Through a pragmatic analysis of the task and a consequent reformulation of it, we show that the effect does not depend on the presence of uncertainty, but on the introduction of non-relevant goals into the text problem, in both the well-known Gamble problem and the Hawaii problem. © 2006 Psychology Press Ltd.

Pragmatics factors play an important role in experimental studies, as well as in common communicative exchanges, in interpreting experimenter questions. This paper experimentally investigates scalar implicature, a paradigmatic case of conversational implicature that is active at the violation of the Gricean maxim of Quantity: the use of a relatively weak term indicates that the speaker had reason not to use a more informative term from the same scale. The present work aims to investigate the pragmatic competence of scholar children with the scalar implicature produced by the quantifier "Some". Four experiments are presented. The first one aims to reply previous results (Noveck, 2001) by modifying some inappropriate aspects of that procedure (Control Experiment). Experiments 1 and 2 want to investigate the interpretation of the quantifier in a context which allows to choose what situation is better described by a sen tence; this is made in order to verify if children, when they can operate a choice, prefer the situation consistent with the pragmatic interpretation of the term. Experiment 3 investigates the production of the scalar implicature in a different context: this one explicitly defines the whole to which the quantifier is referring to. The aim of the study is to show that is fundamental an exhaustive communication of experimenter's intention, in order to detain children interpretation of scalar implicature. In the whole, results indicate that children interpret "Some" in the pragmatic way, when the experimenter's intention is clear to them. *** Scopo della ricerca è indagare la competenza pragmatica nei bambini relativamente alle implicature scalari. In particolare, i quattro esperimenti presentati hanno come oggetto la comprensione del quantificatore "Alcuni". Lo studio prende le mosse da un lavoro di Noveck (2001), che sembra dimostrare la difficoltà dei bambini nel comprendere il quantificatore "Alcuni" nella sua accezione pragmatica di "Alcuni...non tut

The study shows that pragmatics affects probabilistic reasoning. In particular, we investigated the Lawyer-Engineer problem (by Tversky and Kahneman) that has an evident heterogeneous structure in that the base rate is in the form of a percentage while the individuating information is in the form of a description. Our hypothesis was that the participants stop their reflection after they have worked out a typicality value of their own because they think that, in exploiting the description , they have fulfilled their task, in accordance with the theoretical framework of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory. Three main conclusions can be drawn from the experiments, that compare the relevance-based explanation of performance, the integration of information and the representativeness explanation.

The way people respond to the chance that an unlikely event will occur depends on how the event is described. We propose that people attach more weight to unlikely events when they can easily generate or imagine examples in which the event has occurred or will occur than when they cannot. We tested this idea in two experiments with mock jurors using written murder scenarios. The results suggested that jurors attach more weight to the defendant's claim that an incriminating DNA match is merely coincidental when it is easy for them to imagine other individuals whose DNA would also match than when it is not easy for them to imagine such individuals. We manipulated the difficulty of imagining such examples by varying the description of the DNA-match statistic. Some of the variations that influenced the jurors were normatively irrelevant.

I propose a simple theory on the use of base rate according to which neither heuristic nor frequentist factors underlie demonstrations of the occurrence or the elimination of the base-rate fallacy, According to this view, what is crucial for the occurrence or elimination of the base-rate fallacy is the absence or presence, respectively, of what can be called a partitive formulation ((Mac-chi, 1995) of the conditional likelihood datum. A partitive formulation defines the set of which the numerical datum is a part tin terms of percentages or frequencies) by referring to the likelihood datum relative to the base rate information, The predictive power of this hypothesis is shown by comparing responses to different versions of problems containing the same implied natural heuristic principles and supplied data, but which differ in the way the information is presented (partitive vs nonpartitive), Whether probabilistic or frequentist, the partitive versions lead to an almost complete elimination of the bias which remains when nonpartitive versions are used. On the basis of these experimental results, the paper includes a critical discussion of heuristic, frequentist, and mental models theories. (C) 2000 Academic Press.

Recent studies have demonstrated subadditivity of human probability judgment: The judged probabilities for an event partition sum to more than 1. We report conditions under which people's probability judgments are superadditive instead: The component judgments for a partition sum to less than 1. Both directions of deviation from additivity are interpreted in a common framework, in which probability judgments are often mediated by judgments of evidence. The 2 kinds of nonadditivity result from differences in recruitment of supporting evidence together with reduced processing of nonfocal propo- sitions.