{"id":16007,"date":"2023-12-04T05:58:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-04T10:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/2023\/12\/04\/colloquium-12-8-benjamin-spector-institut-jean-nicod-cnrs-ens-ehess-2\/"},"modified":"2023-12-04T08:39:13","modified_gmt":"2023-12-04T13:39:13","slug":"colloquium-12-8-benjamin-spector-institut-jean-nicod-cnrs-ens-ehess-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2023\/12\/04\/colloquium-12-8-benjamin-spector-institut-jean-nicod-cnrs-ens-ehess-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Colloquium 12\/8 - Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS-ENS-EHESS))"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaker: <\/strong> Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS-ENS-EHESS))

\nTitle: <\/strong>Reasoning with Quantifiers, Lewisian Imaging and the Confirmation Paradox

\nTime: <\/strong>Friday, December 8th, 3:30pm - 5pm

\nLocation: <\/strong>32-141

\n

\nAbstract: <\/strong>From a normative point of view, the conclusions we can draw from a sentence of the form No A is B are the same as the ones we can draw from No B is A, because No is a symmetric determiner, and therefore these two sentence types are logically equivalent. I will present experimental evidence (based on joint work with Vincent Mouly) showing that people do not in fact reason in the same way with No A is B and with No B is A. In particular, people’s estimate of the number of As after processing No A is B is higher than after processing No B is A (and vice-versa for B). I will argue that this instantiates a more general property of restrictors: we tend not to revise our beliefs about the size of the restrictor set even when receiving information that would in fact warrant such a revision. I will argue that this effect can be explained if we make the following hypotheses:<\/p>\n

- Belief update does not (always) correspond to probabilistic conditionalization, but can also proceed by Imaging, as defined by David Lewis (1976). In a nutshell, when revising our beliefs with a proposition S, our posterior degree of confidence in a certain proposition T corresponds to our prior degree of confidence in the conditional ‘If S, T’ (using Stalnaker’s semantics for conditionals), rather than to the conditional probability P(T|S).
\n- Restrictors tend to serve as anchors when we engage in conditional reasoning: when considering the different ways in which a quantified sentence could be true, we mentally keep constant the restrictor set. I will relate this both to the possibility of de re readings for restrictors and to recent experimental results about verification strategies for quantified statements (Knowlton, Pietroski, Williams et al. 2023).<\/p>\n

I will show that how these findings and the proposed theory can shed light on the confirmation paradox (see also Rinard 2014): given a statement S of the form ‘All As are Bs’, people are more prone to think that an observation of an object that has both properties A and B ‘confirms’ S than they are to think that observing an object that is both not-B and not-A confirms S, and I will discuss, time permitting, further experimental results (based on joint work with Nicolas Poisson) pertaining to the confirmation paradox.<\/p>\n

Selected References:<\/span><\/p>\n

- Knowlton, T., Pietroski, P, Williams, A., Halberda, J & Lidz, J. (2023), Psycholinguistic evidence for restricted quantification. Nat Lang Semantics 31, 219\u0096251. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/s11050-023-09209-w
\n- Lewis, D., (1976), Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities, Philosophical Review, 85(3): 297\u0096315. doi:10.2307\/2184045
\n- Rinard, S. (2014), A New Bayesian Solution to the Paradox of the Ravens, Philosophy of Science 81 (1):81-100 (2014)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaker: Benjamin Spector (Institut Jean Nicod (CNRS-ENS-EHESS)) Title: Reasoning with Quantifiers, Lewisian Imaging and the Confirmation Paradox Time: Friday, December 8th, 3:30pm - 5pm Location: 32-141 Abstract: From a normative point of view, the conclusions we can draw from a sentence of the form No A is B are the same as the ones we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16007","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16007","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16007"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16007\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16011,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16007\/revisions\/16011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16007"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16007"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16007"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}