Paraphrases of Counterfactual and Causal Conditionals

Paraphrases of Counterfactual and Causal Conditionals Caren A. Frosch (froschc@tcd.ie) Ruth M.J. Byrne (rmbyrne@tcd.ie) Psychology Department, University of Dublin, Trinity College. Dublin 2, Ireland constructions (see Table 1). There were few systematic differences between the different types of causal relations. Introduction Counterfactual conditionals seem to be understood differently from factual conditionals. People may understand a factual conditional, e.g., ‘if Joe cut his finger it bled’ by initially envisaging just one true possibility, ‘Joe cut his finger and it bled’ (Johnson-Laird & Byrne, 1991; 2002). Counterfactual conditionals are different. People understand a counterfactual, e.g., ‘if Joe had cut his finger it would have bled’ by keeping in mind several possibilities. They think about the conjecture ‘Joe cut his finger and it bled’ and about the presupposed facts, ‘Joe did not cut his finger and it did not bleed’ (Byrne & Tasso, 1999). Causal relations are often expressed in conditional ‘if’ assertions. There are different sorts of causal relations, such as strong ones, e.g., ‘if Joe cut his finger it bled’, weak ones, e.g., ‘if the apples were ripe they fell off the tree’, and enabling ones, e.g., ‘if the ignition key was turned the car started’. People think about different sorts of possibilities when they understand them (Goldvarg & Johnson-Laird, 2001). Our aim was to examine whether people form different mental representations of factual and counterfactual conditionals, and different representations of strong, weak, and enabling causal relations. Table 1: Percentages of each type of paraphrase as a function of type of conditional, factual or counterfactual Connective Results The results of both experiments showed that factual conditionals tended to be paraphrased most often by temporal connectives and counterfactuals by subjunctive Experiment 2 Factual Counterfactual Discussion Experiments Participants were asked to paraphrase conditional assertions without using ‘if’ (24 conditionals in experiment 1 and 12 in experiment 2). A conditional, e.g., ‘if Joe cut his finger then it bled’, can be paraphrased in several ways, e.g., ‘Joe’s finger bled when he cut it’, ‘Joe cut his finger and then it bled’, or ‘cutting Joe’s finger caused it to bleed’. Counterfactual The two experiments show that people paraphrase factual and counterfactual conditionals by using different sorts of connectives. The data provide some support for the idea that people mentally represent factual conditionals by keeping in mind a single possibility (and so they use temporal connectives that refer to a single possibility); people mentally represent counterfactual conditionals by keeping in mind several possibilities (and so they use subjunctive constructions that capture several possibilities). Their mental representation of causal relations appears to be influenced primarily by the conditional that expresses the causal relation, i.e., whether it is factual or counterfactual. In two experiments we compared factual and counterfactual conditionals that expressed strong, weak, and enabling causal relations. In both experiments we relied on the sorts of paraphrases people produced as an indicator of the sorts of mental representations they formed (Fillenbaum, 1974). In the second experiment we provided a context to emphasise the different types of causal relations. Method Experiment 1 Factual Temporal Causal Conjunctive Conditional Subjunctive Acknowledgments This research was funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences major research grants. References Byrne, R. M. J., & Tasso, A. (1999). Deductive reasoning with factual, possible, and counterfactual conditionals. Memory and Cognition, 27 (4), 726-740. Fillenbaum, S. (1974). Pragmatic Normalization: Further Results For Some Conjunctive And Disjunctive Sentences. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 102 (4), Goldvarg, E. , & Johnson-Laird, P. N. (2001). Naive causality: a mental model theory of causal meaning and reasoning. Cognitive Science, 25, 565-610. Johnson-Laird, P. N. , & Byrne, R. M. J. (1991). Deduction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Johnson-Laird, P. N. , & Byrne, R. M. J. (2002). Conditionals: A theory of meaning, pragmatics, and inferences. Psychological Review, 109 (4), 646-678.