Some Empirical Results Concerning Deontic Reasoning: Models, Schema, or Both?

Herein, we explore the psychology of deontic reasoning through the presentation of a heterogeneous natural logic combining inference schemas with a preferencebased model-theoretic semantics such as those typically found in various formalisms for nonmonotonic reasoning. We conjecture that the heterogeneous approach is a generalization of various other hypotheses concerning deontic reasoning, and provides a robust framework for explaining semantic intricacies which are present in socalled “deontic paradoxes.” As an initial investigation, two theories were tested: The first hypothesis states that people represent an obligation as a conditional statement which explicitly includes the concept of violation, and the other postulates that people not only prefer deontically perfect situations to less-than-perfect situations, but also have preference between these sub-ideal situations. Two sets of experiments were conducted in order to gain some insight regarding these two ideas, and the results show strong evidence supporting our initial intuitions.