Recently, conditional logics have been developed for application to problems in default reasoning. We present a uniform framework for the development and investigation of conditional logics to represent and reason with “normality”, and demonstrate these logics to be equivalent to extensions of the modal system S4. We also show that two conditional logics, recently proposed to reason with defaul...

Conditional promises and threats are speech acts that can be used to manipulate the behavior of other persons. Although reasoning studies have been able to reveal some peculiarities of these concepts, the explanation has remained fragmentary. To fill in this gap, a theoretical analysis of conditional inducements is proposed, which integrates cognitive as well as emotional aspects. An experiment...

Conditional knowledge bases have been proposed as belief bases that include defeasible rules (also called defaults) of the form “ ! ”, which informally read as “generally, if then .” Such rules may have exceptions, which can be handled in different ways. A number of entailment semantics for conditional knowledge bases have been proposed in the literature. However, while the semantic properties ...

Recent studies on logical reasoning have suggested that people are intuitively aware of the logical validity of syllogisms or that they intuitively detect conflict between heuristic responses and logical norms via slight changes in their feelings. According to logical intuition studies, logically valid or heuristic logic no-conflict reasoning is fluently processed and induces positive feelings ...

In two experiments, we examined the prediction that there should be a relation between the speed with which subjects can retrieve potential causes for given effects and their reasoning with causal conditional premises (if cause P, then effect Q). It was also predicted that when subjects are given effects for which there exists a single strongly associated cause, speed of retrieval of a second p...

In everyday conversation "if" is one of the most frequently used conjunctions. This dissertation investigates what meaning an everyday conditional transmits and what inferences it licenses. It is suggested that the nature of the relation between the two propositions in a conditional might play a major role for both questions. Thus, in the experiments reported here conditional statements that de...

Conditionals play crucial roles in human reasoning. They represent rules, causal relationship, and explicit inference. Psychology of reasoning, from its inception, has been studying how humans use and understand conditionals. One prominent feature of humans’ conditionals is that it does not follow the pattern of the standard model of conditionals. In classical logic, the corresponding connectiv...

This study presents an integrative typology of personality assessment for aggression. In this typology, self-report and conditional reasoning (L. R. James, 1998) methodologies are used to assess 2 separate, yet often congruent, components of aggressive personalities. Specifically, self-report is used to assess explicit components of aggressive tendencies, such as self-perceived aggression, wher...

A fine-grained dual-process approach to conditional reasoning is advocated: Responses to conditional syllogisms are reached through the operation of either one of two systems, each of which can rely on two different mechanisms. System1 relies either on pragmatic implicatures or on the retrieval of information from semantic memory; System2 operates first through inhibition of System1, then (but ...

Recent years have seen a lot of work towards extending the established AGM belief revision theory with respect to iterating revision, preserving conditional beliefs, and handling sets of propositions as new information. In particular, novel postulates like independence and evidence retainment have been brought forth as new standards for revising epistemic states by (sets of) propositional infor...