Semantic Relations Of Sufficient Condition For Full Conditional Reasoning

The study of sufficient conditional reasoning is the most popular topic among the studies of conditional reasoning of the reasoning psychology. Sufficient conditional reasoning consists of major premise, minor premise, and conclusion. Major premise refers to the sufficient conditional proposition " If p, then q ". Logic semantic relation between antecedent and consequent of sufficient conditionals is made up of two parts: sufficiency of antecedent for consequent and necessity of consequent for antecedent. Previous studies showed that the explicitness of sufficiency of antecedent for consequent influence the performance of conditional reasoning. However, these studies were limited in thematic conditionals, while ignoring the similar influence of consequent for antecedent as well as in abstract conditionals. Logic expression and perception expression of semantic relation for conditionals are different. Previous studies only investigated perception expression ignoring the exploring of logic expression.Thus, the present research designs two experiments to investigate for college subjects how the explicitness of sufficiency and necessity of consequent for antecedent would influence sufficient conditional reasoning, along with their semantic understanding of the semantic relation for conditionals expressed in two different forms. In Experiment 1, the author aims to investigate with abstract conditionals (contingence conditionals and contingence conditionals based on context) how the explicitness of sufficiency and necessity of consequent for antecedent would influence sufficient conditional reasoning and the college subjects'understanding of the two expressions of semantic relation. The difference between contingence conditionals and contingence conditionals based on context lies in that the necessity of consequent for antecedent of the contingence conditionals based on context is explicit and easy to be perceived. In Experiment 2, the author uses contingence and four kinds of thematic conditionals (obligation conditional, causal conditional, definition conditional and permission conditional) to study how the explicitness of sufficiency and necessity of consequent for antecedent would influence sufficient conditional reasoning and subjects' understanding of the two expressions of semantic relation.The results of the two experiments are summarized as follows, (1) The explicitness and implicitness of the necessity of consequent for antecedent have an impact on the performance of sufficient conditional reasoning;(2) The different expressions of semantic relation understanding task influence the understanding of semantic relation of conditionals, and there are both association and disassociation between logic task and perception task.