Naïve epistemics: A theory of rational and error-prone mental state reasoning

Resumen

Effective communication depends on reasoning about what others know and believe, and failures in executive functioning can disrupt the way adults reason about mental states. No study has revealed errors traceable to mental state reasoning processes, such as failures in interpreting premises, simulating possibilities, and formulating conclusions. We developed such a theory to account for both rational and error-prone mental state reasoning; to test it, we investigated a family of specific mental state reasoning inferences concerning agents and their states of knowledge and belief. Online participants in eight preregistered studies (N = 484) considered conditional inferences couched in terms of a mental state, e.g., Alia knows that if it’s rainy then the café is closed; It’s rainy. What follows? They generated natural conclusions using a novel sentence construction interface (Experiments 1a-e, 3, 4) and by typing out responses (Experiment 2). These generative tasks permitted analyses of participants’ tendency to draw sensible epistemic conclusions as well as their systematic errors. One family of errors was an “omniscience” error: reasoners erroneously imputed knowledge of a deductive consequence to an individual. We explain these results in the context of a novel, model-based theory of epistemic reasoning.

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Cómo citar (APA 7)

Bio, B. J., & Khemlani, S. (2024). Naïve epistemics: A theory of rational and error-prone mental state reasoning. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jmnrf