Society is facing uncertainty on a multitude of domains and levels: usually, reasoning and decisions about political, economic, or health issues must be made under uncertainty. Among various approaches to probability, this chapter presents the coherence approach to probability as a method for uncertainty management. The authors explain the role of uncertainty in the context of important societal issues like legal reasoning and vaccination hesitancy. Finally, the chapter presents selected psychological factors which impact probabilistic representation and reasoning and discusses what (...) society can and cannot learn from the coherence approach from theoretical and practical perspectives. (shrink)

Various semantics for studying the square of opposition have been proposed recently. So far, only [14] studied a probabilistic version of the square where the sentences were interpreted by (negated) defaults. We extend this work by interpreting sentences by imprecise (set-valued) probability assessments on a sequence of conditional events. We introduce the acceptability of a sentence within coherence-based probability theory. We analyze the relations of the square in terms of acceptability and show how to construct probabilistic versions of the square (...) of opposition by forming suitable tripartitions. Finally, as an application, we present a new square involving generalized quantifiers. (shrink)

I present a conceptual framework for classifying generalist and particularist approaches to conspiracy theories (CTs). Specifically, I exploit a probabilistic version of the hexagon of opposition which allows for systematically visualising the logical relations among basic philosophical positions concerning CTs. The probabilistic interpretation can also account for positions, which make weaker claims about CTs: e.g. instead of claiming ‘every CT is suspicious’ some theorists might prefer to claim ‘most CTs are suspicious’ and then ask about logical consequences of such claims. (...) Finally, I illustrate the proposed conceptual framework by selected claims about CTs drawn from the CT research literature. (shrink)

The current special issue focuses on logical and probabilistic approaches to reasoning in uncertain environments, both from a formal, conceptual and argumentative perspective as well as an empirical point of view. In the present introduction we give an overview of the types of problems addressed by the individual contributions of the special issue, based on fundamental distinctions employed in this area. We furthermore describe some of the general features of the special issue.

According to the weak version of linguistic relativity, also called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the features of an individual’s native language influence his worldview and perception. We decided to test this hypothesis on the sufficient conditional and the necessary conditional, expressed differently in Chinese and French. In Chinese, connectors for both conditionals exist and are used in everyday life, while there is only a connector for the sufficient conditional in French. A first hypothesis follows from linguistic relativity: for the necessary conditional, (...) better logic performance is expected in Chinese participants rather than French participants. As a second hypothesis, for all participants, we expect performance on the sufficient conditional to be better than on the necessary conditional. Indeed, despite the isomorphism of the two conditionals, they differ in how information is processed for reasoning. We decided to study reasoning under uncertainty as it reflects reality more accurately. To do so, we analyzed the coherence of participants using de Finetti’s theory for deduction under uncertainty. The results of our study show no significant difference in performance between Chinese and French participants, neither on the sufficient conditional nor on the necessary conditional. Thus, our first hypothesis derived from the weak version of linguistic relativity is not confirmed. In contrast, our results confirm the second hypothesis in two out of three inference schemas. (shrink)

This paper describes a cubic water tank equipped with a movable partition receiving various amounts of liquid used to represent joint probability distributions. This device is applied to the investigation of deductive inferences under uncertainty. The analogy is exploited to determine by qualitative reasoning the limits in probability of the conclusion of twenty basic deductive arguments (such as Modus Ponens, And-introduction, Contraposition, etc.) often used as benchmark problems by the various theoretical approaches to reasoning under uncertainty. The probability bounds imposed (...) by the premises on the conclusion are derived on the basis of a few trivial principles such as "a part of the tank cannot contain more liquid than its capacity allows", or "if a part is empty, the other part contains all the liquid". This stems from the equivalence between the physical constraints imposed by the capacity of the tank and its subdivisions on the volumes of liquid, and the axioms and rules of probability. The device materializes de Finetti's coherence approach to probability. It also suggests a physical counterpart of Dutch book arguments to assess individuals' rationality in probability judgments in the sense that individuals whose degrees of belief in a conclusion are out of the bounds of coherence intervals would commit themselves to executing physically impossible tasks. (shrink)

We present an interdisciplinary approach to argumentation combining logical, probabilistic, and psychological perspectives. We investigate logical attack principles which relate attacks among claims with logical form. For example, we consider the principle that an argument that attacks another argument claiming A triggers the existence of an attack on an argument featuring the stronger claim A ∧ B. We formulate a number of such principles pertaining to conjunctive, disjunctive, negated, and implicational claims. Some of these attack principles seem to be prima (...) facie more plausible than others. To support this intuition, we suggest an interpretation of these principles in terms of coherent conditional probabilities. This interpretation is naturally generalized from qualitative to quantitative principles. Specifically, we use our probabilistic semantics to evaluate the rationality of principles which govern the strength of argumentative attacks. In order to complement our theoretical analysis with an empirical perspective, we present an experiment with students of the TU Vienna ( n = 139) which explores the psychological plausibility of selected attack principles. We also discuss how our qualitative attack principles relate to well-known types of logical argumentation frameworks. Finally, we briefly discuss how our approach relates to the computational argumentation literature. (shrink)

This position paper advocates combining formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning in the studies of conditionals and reasoning with uncertainty. The new paradigm psychology of reasoning is characterized by the use of probability theory as a rationality framework instead of classical logic, used by more traditional approaches to the psychology of reasoning. This paper presents a new interdisciplinary research program which involves both formal and experimental work. To illustrate the program, the paper discusses recent work on the (...) paradoxes of the material conditional, nonmonotonic reasoning, and Adams’ Thesis. It also identifies the issue of updating on conditionals as an area which seems to call for a combined formal and empirical approach. (shrink)

We present a unified approach for investigating rational reasoning about basic argument forms involving indicative conditionals, counterfactuals, and basic quantified statements within coherence-based probability logic. After introducing the rationality framework, we present an interactive view on the relation between normative and empirical work. Then, we report a new experiment which shows that people interpret indicative conditionals and counterfactuals by coherent conditional probability assertions and negate conditionals by negating their consequents. The data support the conditional probability interpretation of conditionals and the (...) narrow-scope reading of the negation of conditionals. Finally, we argue that coherent conditional probabilities are important for probabilistic analyses of conditionals, nonmonotonic reasoning, quantified statements, and paradoxes. (shrink)

There are several approaches implementing reasoning based on conditional knowledge bases, one of the most popular being System Z (Pearl, Proceedings of the 3rd conference on theoretical aspects of reasoning about knowledge, TARK ’90, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA, pp. 121–135, 1990). We look at ranking functions (Spohn, The Laws of Belief: Ranking Theory and Its Philosophical Applications, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012) in general, conditional structures and c-representations (Kern-Isberner, Conditionals in Nonmonotonic Reasoning and Belief Revision: Considering (...) Conditionals as Agents, vol. 2087 of LNCS, Springer, Berlin, 2001) in order to examine the reasoning strength of the different approaches by learning which of the known calculi of nonmonotonic reasoning (System P and R) and Direct Inference are applicable to these inference relations. Furthermore we use the recently proposed Enforcement-postulate (Kern-Isberner and Krümpelmann, Proceedings of the 22nd international joint conference on artificial intelligence, vol. 2, IJCAI’11, AAAI Press, pp. 937–942, 2011) to show dependencies between these approaches. (shrink)

Psychological research on people’s understanding of natural language connectives has traditionally used truth table tasks, in which participants evaluate the truth or falsity of a compound sentence given the truth or falsity of its components in the framework of propositional logic. One perplexing result concerned the indicative conditional if A then C which was often evaluated as true when A and C are true, false when A is true and C is false but irrelevant“ (devoid of value) when A is (...) false (whatever the value of C). This was called the “psychological defective table of the conditional.” Here we show that far from being anomalous the “defective” table pattern reveals a coherent semantics for the basic connectives of natural language in a trivalent framework. This was done by establishing participants’ truth tables for negation, conjunction, disjunction, conditional, and biconditional, when they were presented with statements that could be certainly true, certainly false, or neither. We review systems of three-valued tables from logic, linguistics, foundations of quantum mechanics, philosophical logic, and artificial intelligence, to see whether one of these systems adequately describes people’s interpretations of natural language connectives. We find that de Finetti’s (1936/1995) three-valued system is the best approximation to participants’ truth tables. (shrink)

While Classical Logic (CL) used to be the gold standard for evaluating the rationality of human reasoning, certain non-theorems of CL—like Aristotle’s and Boethius’ theses—appear intuitively rational and plausible. Connexive logics have been developed to capture the underlying intuition that conditionals whose antecedents contradict their consequents, should be false. We present results of two experiments (total n = 72), the first to investigate connexive principles and related formulae systematically. Our data suggest that connexive logics provide more plausible rationality frameworks for (...) human reasoning compared to CL. Moreover, we experimentally investigate two approaches for validating connexive principles within the framework of coherence-based probability logic (Pfeifer & Sanfilippo, 2021). Overall, we observed good agreement between our predictions and the data, but especially for Approach 2. (shrink)

We present a formal measure of argument strength, which combines the ideas that conclusions of strong arguments are (i) highly probable and (ii) their uncertainty is relatively precise. Likewise, arguments are weak when their conclusion probability is low or when it is highly imprecise. We show how the proposed measure provides a new model of the Ellsberg paradox. Moreover, we further substantiate the psychological plausibility of our approach by an experiment (N = 60). The data show that the proposed measure (...) predicts human inferences in the original Ellsberg task and in corresponding argument strength tasks. Finally, we report qualitative data taken from structured interviews on folk psychological conceptions on what argument strength means. (shrink)