Jean Baratgin
The Psychology of Uncertainty and Three-Valued Truth Tables
Baratgin, Jean; Politzer, Guy; Over, David E.; Takahashi, Tatsuji
Abstract
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.
Citation
Baratgin, J., Politzer, G., Over, D. E., & Takahashi, T. (2018). The Psychology of Uncertainty and Three-Valued Truth Tables. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, Article 1479. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01479
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Online Publication Date | Sep 4, 2018 |
Publication Date | Sep 4, 2018 |
Deposit Date | Sep 21, 2018 |
Publicly Available Date | Sep 21, 2018 |
Journal | Frontiers in Psychology |
Print ISSN | 1664-1078 |
Publisher | Frontiers Media |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 9 |
Article Number | 1479 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01479 |
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Copyright Statement
© 2018 Baratgin, Politzer, Over and Takahashi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
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