The Relations Between The Categorization And Diversity Principle Of Inductive Reasoning

It had been proved to be true by many famous researchers that the diversity principle of inductive reasoning exist everywhere in our daily life. There has been considerable evidence that people respect this principle in inductive reasoning. Howerver,some other reasearchers such as Medin and Heit, have different view on this issue. In the paper"A Relevance Theory of Inductive Reasoning", Medin introduced a relevance theory of inductive reasoning, and used this theory to predict an exception-the non-diversity by property reinforcement effect. And an experiment was made to investigate this phenominon, and the results did. After that, Heit,proved this is diversity effect ,not nondiversity effect. Subjects made inductive strength judgments and similarity judgments for stimuli from Medin et al. The inductive strength judgments showed the same pattern as in Medin et al., however the similarity judgments suggested that the pattern should be interpreted as a diversity effect rather than non-diversity. We based our research on the dispute between Medin and Heit. And we expected to resolve their dispute, and to discuss the cause of the dispute. Firstly, we perfectly repeated their respective research, and find that their research can prove their respecitve view on diversity principle. Moreover, in order to ascertain the cause of their dipute, we made another two trials based on the previous repeated researchers, and importantly we explored the relations between the categorization and the diversity principle of inductive reasoning. It concluded that:(1) The two scholars' dispute on the diversity principle was caused by the categorizaion task. The inductive reasoning is significantly effected by the categorization. When the categorizaion is explicit, the results of inductive reasoning support nor Medin's view neither Heit's view. That is subjects hesitate, they either choose the biology taxonomic criterion as their accordance to reasoning, or choose the non-biology taxonomic criterion as their accordance to reasoning. While the categorization implicit, our results support Heit's view.(2) In our daily life, people sometimes according to intuitive and the whole similarity to categorizaion and diversity reasoning. So, when the non-biology taxonomy is prominent, the biology taxonomy losts its superiority.(3) We actually argued that the diversity principle is an universal rule of inductive reasoning. And we ultimately solve the dipute between Medin and Heit.(4) It is concluded that the evidence regarding the predicted non-diversity by property reinforcement effect does not give distinctive support for relevance theory.