Salvador Mascarenhas
Biographic Data
| ID | 5996491 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Salvador Mascarenhas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Salvador |
| FAMILY NAME | Mascarenhas |
| SIGNATURE | MASCARENHAS S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3381-8688 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 16 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2013 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Plural Causes
Causal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a lightning strike, for example, people tend to say that the lightning bolt was the cause of the fire, not mentioning the presence of oxygen in the air, although they are well aware that the latter was no less indispensable for the fire to occur. The extant litera…
Shared mechanisms in pragmatic enrichment with contextual and lexical alternatives
On the Interplay Between Interpretation and Reasoning in Compelling Fallacies
We investigate the articulation between domain-general reasoning and interpretive processes in failures of deductive reasoning. We focus on illusory inferences from disjunction-like elements, a broad class of deductive fallacies studied in some detail over the past 15 years. These fallacies have received accounts grounded in reasoning processes, holding that human reasoning diverges from normative standards. A subset of these fallacies, however, …
The conjunction fallacy
The Conjunction Fallacy
The conjunction fallacy is the well-documented reasoning error on which people rate a conjunction A&B as more probable than one of its conjuncts, A. Many explanations appeal to the fact that B has a high probability in the given scenarios, but Tentori et al. (2013) have challenged such approaches. They report experiments suggesting that degree of confirmation—rather than probability—is the central determinant of the conjunction fallacy. In this p…
Plural causes in causal judgment
Causal selection is the process whereby people decide which of several events responsible for a realized outcome should be considered as “the cause” of that outcome. A theory of causal selection requires a definition of the relevant candidates to be considered for selection. So far, the psychological literature has operated on the implicit premise that the only relevant candidates for causal selection are individual variables, corresponding to th…
Super Linguistics
We argue that formal linguistic theory, properly extended, can provide a unifying framework for diverse phenomena beyond traditional linguistic objects. We display applications to pictorial meanings, visual narratives, music, dance, animal communication, and, more abstractly, to logical and non-logical concepts in the ‘language of thought’ and reasoning. In many of these cases, a careful analysis reveals that classic linguistic notions are pervas…
Modality, expected utility, and hypothesis testing
We introduce an expected-value theory of linguistic modality that makes reference to expected utility and a likelihood-based confirmation measure for deontics and epistemics, respectively. The account is a probabilistic semantics for deontics and epistemics, yet it proposes that deontics and epistemics share a common core modal semantics, as in traditional possible-worlds analysis of modality. We argue that this account is not only theoretically …
Alternatives and attention in language and reasoning
In this paper, we employ an experimental paradigm using insights from the psychology of reasoning to investigate the question whether certain modals generate and draw attention to alternatives. The article extends and builds on the methodology and findings of Mascarenhas & Picat 2019. Based on experimental results, they argue that the English epistemic modal might raises alternatives. We apply the same methodology to the English modal allowed to …
Question-answer dynamics in deductive fallacies without language
We introduce purely visual paradigms that convey the logical structure of illusory inferences from disjunction: (a AND b) OR c, a |- b. Although the logical information was conveyed entirely via non-linguistic means, we found that the visual paradigms induce reasoning fallacies, though less attractive than their linguistic counterparts. The visual paradigms highlight the role of alternative-based reasoning, or question-answer dynamics, as they co…
Question-answer dynamics and confirmation theory in reasoning by representativeness
We show that probabilistic decision-making behavior characteristic of reasoning by representativeness or typicality arises in minimalistic settings lacking many of the features previously thought to be necessary conditions for the phenomenon. Specifically, we develop a version of a classical experiment by Kahneman and Tversky (1973) on base-rate neglect, where participants have full access to the probabilistic distribution, conveyed entirely visu…
A Note on the Cardinalities of Sets of Scalar Alternatives
Formal theories of scalar implicature appeal crucially to a set of alternatives. These are the alternative statements that a speaker could have made but chose not to in pragmatic accounts, and the alternative statements that figure in the computation of exhaustivity operators in grammatical approaches. I show that the three sufficiently explicit theories of alternatives in the literature generate sets of alternatives that grow at least exponentia…
Indirect illusory inferences from disjunction
Indirect illusory inferences from disjunction
(Preprint of article forthcoming in Review of Philosophy and Psychology ; accepted March 2021.) We provide a new link between deductive and probabilistic reasoning fallacies. Illusory inferences from disjunction are a broad class of deductive fallacies traditionally explained by recourse to a matching procedure that looks for content overlap between premises. In two behavioral experiments, we show that this phenomenon is instead sensitive to real…
Illusory inferences with quantifiers
The psychological study of reasoning with quantifiers has predominantly focused on inference patterns studied by Aristotle about two millennia ago. Modern logic has shown a wealth of inference patterns involving quantifiers that are far beyond the expressive power of Aristotelian syllogisms, and whose psychology should be explored. We bring to light a novel class of fallacious inference patterns, some of which are so attractive that they are tant…
The Erotetic Theory of Reasoning
International audience
The Erotetic Theory of Reasoning
International audience
The Erotetic Theory of Reasoning
International audience
Illusory inferences with quantifiers
The psychological study of reasoning with quantifiers has predominantly focused on inference patterns studied by Aristotle about two millennia ago. Modern logic has shown a wealth of inference patterns involving quantifiers that are far beyond the expressive power of Aristotelian syllogisms, and whose psychology should be explored. We bring to light a novel class of fallacious inference patterns, some of which are so attractive that they are tant…
Indirect illusory inferences from disjunction
(Preprint of article forthcoming in Review of Philosophy and Psychology ; accepted March 2021.) We provide a new link between deductive and probabilistic reasoning fallacies. Illusory inferences from disjunction are a broad class of deductive fallacies traditionally explained by recourse to a matching procedure that looks for content overlap between premises. In two behavioral experiments, we show that this phenomenon is instead sensitive to real…
Question-answer dynamics and confirmation theory in reasoning by representativeness
We show that probabilistic decision-making behavior characteristic of reasoning by representativeness or typicality arises in minimalistic settings lacking many of the features previously thought to be necessary conditions for the phenomenon. Specifically, we develop a version of a classical experiment by Kahneman and Tversky (1973) on base-rate neglect, where participants have full access to the probabilistic distribution, conveyed entirely visu…
A Note on the Cardinalities of Sets of Scalar Alternatives
Formal theories of scalar implicature appeal crucially to a set of alternatives. These are the alternative statements that a speaker could have made but chose not to in pragmatic accounts, and the alternative statements that figure in the computation of exhaustivity operators in grammatical approaches. I show that the three sufficiently explicit theories of alternatives in the literature generate sets of alternatives that grow at least exponentia…
Indirect illusory inferences from disjunction
Alternatives and attention in language and reasoning
In this paper, we employ an experimental paradigm using insights from the psychology of reasoning to investigate the question whether certain modals generate and draw attention to alternatives. The article extends and builds on the methodology and findings of Mascarenhas & Picat 2019. Based on experimental results, they argue that the English epistemic modal might raises alternatives. We apply the same methodology to the English modal allowed to …
Question-answer dynamics in deductive fallacies without language
We introduce purely visual paradigms that convey the logical structure of illusory inferences from disjunction: (a AND b) OR c, a |- b. Although the logical information was conveyed entirely via non-linguistic means, we found that the visual paradigms induce reasoning fallacies, though less attractive than their linguistic counterparts. The visual paradigms highlight the role of alternative-based reasoning, or question-answer dynamics, as they co…
The Conjunction Fallacy
The conjunction fallacy is the well-documented reasoning error on which people rate a conjunction A&B as more probable than one of its conjuncts, A. Many explanations appeal to the fact that B has a high probability in the given scenarios, but Tentori et al. (2013) have challenged such approaches. They report experiments suggesting that degree of confirmation—rather than probability—is the central determinant of the conjunction fallacy. In this p…
Plural causes in causal judgment
Causal selection is the process whereby people decide which of several events responsible for a realized outcome should be considered as “the cause” of that outcome. A theory of causal selection requires a definition of the relevant candidates to be considered for selection. So far, the psychological literature has operated on the implicit premise that the only relevant candidates for causal selection are individual variables, corresponding to th…
Super Linguistics
We argue that formal linguistic theory, properly extended, can provide a unifying framework for diverse phenomena beyond traditional linguistic objects. We display applications to pictorial meanings, visual narratives, music, dance, animal communication, and, more abstractly, to logical and non-logical concepts in the ‘language of thought’ and reasoning. In many of these cases, a careful analysis reveals that classic linguistic notions are pervas…
Modality, expected utility, and hypothesis testing
We introduce an expected-value theory of linguistic modality that makes reference to expected utility and a likelihood-based confirmation measure for deontics and epistemics, respectively. The account is a probabilistic semantics for deontics and epistemics, yet it proposes that deontics and epistemics share a common core modal semantics, as in traditional possible-worlds analysis of modality. We argue that this account is not only theoretically …
On the Interplay Between Interpretation and Reasoning in Compelling Fallacies
We investigate the articulation between domain-general reasoning and interpretive processes in failures of deductive reasoning. We focus on illusory inferences from disjunction-like elements, a broad class of deductive fallacies studied in some detail over the past 15 years. These fallacies have received accounts grounded in reasoning processes, holding that human reasoning diverges from normative standards. A subset of these fallacies, however, …
The conjunction fallacy
Shared mechanisms in pragmatic enrichment with contextual and lexical alternatives
Plural Causes
Causal selection is the process underlying our intuition that an outcome happened because of a given event, or that an event is the cause of an outcome. When a forest catches fire after a lightning strike, for example, people tend to say that the lightning bolt was the cause of the fire, not mentioning the presence of oxygen in the air, although they are well aware that the latter was no less indispensable for the fire to occur. The extant litera…
Epistemology (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Psychology (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Artificial Intelligence (8 works) · Linguistics (8 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (6 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (5 works) · Cognitive science (5 works)