Describes a specific class of indirectly conveyed meanings which are definitional, or partly definitional, that is, although conveyed by the utterances of sentences, they are not part of the meaning of those sentences. The study considers Strawson's topic-centered approach to presupposition, thematic predicates, and the pragmatics of…

Presentation and criticism of pertinent work, plus the authors' own model. (Text is in French.) (DB)

Examines Jean Piaget's theories on the laws of formal logic, and Johnson's claim that the law of noncontradiction is only descriptive of macroscopic objectives. Suggests Piaget and Johnson are wrong, since the possibility of saying anything significant and informative presupposes the law of noncontradiction is followed. (Author)

Three studies investigated the effects of concrete versus abstract wording and negative versus positive premises on the difficulty subjects had in solving several kinds of reasoning tasks. Subjects for all three studies were college undergraduates who received booklets containing either hypothetical, disjunctive, or linear syllogisms. Each booklet…

A model grounded in recent ordinary language philosophy is proposed which postulates that subjects employ counterfactual and contrastive criteria of causal ascription, as unified in the notion of an abnormal condition. Two experiments satisfy the three criteria specified for an adequate test of the abnormal conditions focus model. (Author/LMO)

A line of reasoning used in recent research on language acquisition assumes that a child acquiring the language has only two reliable sources of information available about the target grammar: a set of grammatical principles and the primary data of the language spoken around him. A third kind of evidence, negative evidence, would be helpful but is…

Presents some personal experimental work relating to world metaphors together with that of others working in the areas of logic, psychology, and philosophy. (NKA)

Experiments are reported in which semantically interrelating sentences were presented to subjects as discrete items, and inference tests were given to measure the degree to which the similar information had been stored in the same memory system. Results suggest that verbal information is sometimes encoded into an episodic system. (Author/RM)

A model is proposed for the general abstracting process (using disciplines such as linguistics, logic, and psychology) that is based on a system of combined strategies with four stages: reading-understanding; selection; interpretation; synthesis. (Author/JKP)

Argues that the syntactic and mental model accounts of the suppression effect in deductive reasoning are inadequate. Proposes a relative salience model. Describes a test of predictions from this model in a suppression model, which obtained evidence of convergent validity for the salience construct. Results could not be reconciled with either the…

Argues that early childhood experiences with processes as diverse as language, mathematics, emotion, and music determine which neurons grow and remain active in the brain. Early exposure to these processes results in receptive programming. Discusses the implications for schools, teachers, and parents. (MJP)

Stanford University's new Symbolic Systems Program is an interdisciplinary undergraduate program focusing on understanding the nature of intelligent behavior. It brings together the disciplines of cognitive psychology, logic, computer science and artificial intelligence, philosophy, and linguistics in a newly emerging field of research concerned…

The focus of the study reported here was to investigate people's comprehension ability as a function of the number and type of negations embedded within sentences similar to those which might appear as premises in syllogisms. The subjects were one group of 11 Hispanic and four groups of Anglo students, with 15 in each Anglo group. Thirty-two…

In the first section a sketch of a tense logic is presented and a mechanism is suggested for including aspects of the tense logic into the Grammar (theory of language). Specifically, several grammatical structures are shown to incorporate temporal features. A semantic projection mechanism is utilized to amalgamate the temporal features in elements…