Abstract
In psychological experiments on reasoning, participants are typically presented with premises which refer to general knowledge or which are integrated in an original scenario; then, either they are asked to derive what follows from the premises or they are provided with one or several conclusions and asked to decide whether or not these conclusions follow from the premises. There is always a logical argument underlying the premises and the conclusion, and the aim of such experiments is to study participants’ performance with respect to a theoretical model, either normative or, as is more usual nowadays, descriptive. The experiments on judgement do not differ much, except that they look more like a problem to solve, where the final question is a request for a comparison, a qualitative or a quantitative evaluation, and so on. The experiment may be administered orally during an interview with the experimenter, but more often it is administered in a written form, using paper and pencil or a computer. Given that there are two interlocutors engaged in a communication, a conversational analysis is appropriate, whether the presence of the experimenter is physically real or mediated by the support of the written messages.
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Politzer, G. (2004). Reasoning, Judgement and Pragmatics. In: Noveck, I.A., Sperber, D. (eds) Experimental Pragmatics. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524125_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524125_5
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