According to Cheng and Holyoak (1985), who initiated this line of research, people apply different reasoning rules to formally isomorphic statements such as “if there are clouds, then it rains” or “if you drink beer, then you must be at least 21 years old.” In the first case, people are guided by knowledge that clouds are a necessary albeit insufficient cause for rain (e.g., causation schema), whereas in the second they are guided by knowledge that drinking age is established by a law that might be disobeyed (i.e., permission schema).Īs in the case of arithmetic operations ( Bassok et al., 1997), the rules of formal logic are semantically compatible with the rules of some schemas but not others. This work has shown that different content instantiations of the material implication (“if p then q”) induce reasoning rules of distinct pragmatic and/or social schemas. They did not initiate research that looks for regularities in the way people select, or adjust, their reasoning tools (e.g., comparison vs integration) to semantic distinctions they deem important (e.g., functional symmetry vs asymmetry).Ī line of research that, in its gist, is probably the closest to the studies reported here looks for regularities in the way semantic knowledge affects reasoning about conditional syllogisms (e.g., Cheng & Holyoak, 1985,1989 Cheng, Holyoak, Nisbett, & Oliver, 1986 Cosmides, 1989 Cosmides & Tooby, 1994 Cummins, 1995 Gigerenzer & Hug, 1992). Unfortunately, such demonstrations were merely added to the list of studies showing that superficial aspects of content and phrasing lead to errors, or make some problem isomorphs more difficult than others. They found that subjects had little difficulty placing a large disk on top of a small disk, but when the disks were labeled “acrobats,” subjects refrained from letting a large acrobat jump on the shoulders of a small acrobat. In a more recent example, Kotovsky, Hayes, and Simon’s (1985) study compared people’s solutions to two versions of the Tower of Hanoi problem. A classic example of such effects would be Duncker’s (1945) work on “functional fixedness,” whereby the functional role of a box as a container pevented people from using the box as a platform on which they could mount a candle.
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It is not that researchers failed to notice that object-based inferences affect reasoning. What is quite surprising, however, is that such effects have been overlooked by researchers who study higher order cognition. Put in this way, the present findings are not very surprising-it is not very surprising that people prefer to compare or combine apples and oranges rather than apples and baskets. The studies reported in this chapter show that such object-based inferences affect how people solve problems, transfer previously learned solutions to novel problems, or judge similarity. Semantic knowledge is organized such that it affords meaningful and adaptive inferences (e.g., apples and oranges are fruit and therefore can play similar functional roles).
![what does semantic rules examples what does semantic rules examples](https://image.slideserve.com/872681/semantic-analysis-l.jpg)
Miriam Bassok, in Psychology of Learning and Motivation, 1997 V Discussion