Volume 28, Number 1, 75-80, DOI: 10.1007/s11245-008-9049-9

The Mental Model Theory of Conditionals: A Reply to Guy Politzer

Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Ruth M. J. Byrne and Vittorio Girotto

From the issue entitled "The enacted mind and the extended mind"

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Abstract

This paper replies to Politzer’s (2007) criticisms of the mental model theory of conditionals. It argues that the theory provides a correct account of negation of conditionals, that it does not provide a truth-functional account of their meaning, though it predicts that certain interpretations of conditionals yield acceptable versions of the ‘paradoxes’ of material implication, and that it postulates three main strategies for estimating the probabilities of conditionals.

Keywords  Human reasoning – Conditionals – Mental models – Probabilistic reasoning

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