Gain-benefit And Avoiding-injuring

This paper contained 12 chapters totally.In Chapter I,philosophical and logicalstudies about inductive problem were recounted.And in Chapter 2,psychological studiesof inductive inference were reviewed.At last,the conclusion being established was that wecould not set up a domain general model about inductive inference.So the article erected abasic hypothesis:Proposition 2.1.Inductive inference are domain specific mental machines shaped bynature selection.The demonstration of Proposition 2.1 was made up of two parts.The first part contained Chapter 3.In this chapter,the basic hypothesis wastransformed into two middle hypotheses.Guided by the paradigm of EvolutionaryPsychology,the transformation was achieved within 4 steps:First step:to explore what kinds of adaptive problems could our ancestors meet.Second step:to consider if it is possible that such adaptive problem could be dealt byspecific machine.Third step:to explore what kind of inner logic did the specific machine run follow.Fourth step:check-up the cognitive process of modern people,to examine if thespecific inner logic do exist.Among the fours,the first and second step belonged to theoretic demonstration,andthe third was to erect the empirical hypothesis,and the fourth was to validate thehypothesis by empirical methods.The Chapter 3 stopped at the third step.At first,"inductive inference was an adaptive problem"had been argued.From thisproposition,a new conclusion was deduced,that was:"inductive inference were domainspecific mental machines".On the other side,"gain-benefit"and"avoid ing-injuring"weresuggested to be most important adaptive domain.Thus,the middle hypotheses wereestablished.They were expressed as two propositions:Proposition 3.1.There would be different inductive inference performance under the conditions of"gain-benefit"and"avoiding-injuring".Proposition 3.2.There would be different inductive logic under the conditions of"gain-benefit"and"avoiding-injuring".Under the condition of gain-benefit,thereasoning would be sufficient and hecessary:but with the condition of avoiding-injuring,the reasoning would just be sufficient.The second part of demonstration was composed by Chapter 4～Chapter 11.Chapter 4 introduced the background information of experimental study which wouldbe carried out.They included:1)the definition of independent variables and dependentvariables;2)the method to master the controlled variables;3)and how to recruit theparticipants.In Chapter 5,two experiments,Exp.1 and Exp.2,had compared the different effectsaroused by category and similarity when inductive inference were engaged.The resultsshowed that as to make inductive inference,people would like to depend on information ofcategory more than that of similarity.In Chapter 6,Exp.3 and Exp.4 had distinguished different effects of inductionbrought by amount of premise and variety of premise.The results showed that people weresensitive to premise-amount and tended to ignore premise-variety.The purpose of former studies were to define the horizon of the whole research.Therewere two important meanings with the conclusions:One:the hypothesis of domain specificity got a chance to be validated,because theadaptive domains were distinguished by category.Two:it was possible to be sure that inductive inference could be an innate faculty,forevidences coming from infant cognition studies had show that very young infant hadexhibited the ability to realize amount.In Chapter 7,Exp.5 had discovered that the performances of inductive inference wereentirely different as under conditions of"gain-benefit"and"avoid ing-injuring".The resultvalidated one of two middle hypotheses,that was Proposition 3.1.From Chapter 8 to Chapter 11,there were 6 experiments to be carry out todemonstrate Proposition 3.2 In this section,reaction time,eye movement,and signaldetection were used.All the results revealed that there were two different information processing to match the conditions of gain-benefit and avoiding-injuring.And also,underthe two conditions,people's reasoning followed two different logics.The conclusionsupported Proposition 3.2.When two middle hypotheses had been demonstrated,the basic hypothesis,that wasProposition 2.1.,could then be validated.At list,an integrative theory was put forward in Chapter 12.It suggested that gain-benefit and avoiding-injuring were two kinds of innate inductive inference machinesshaped by nature selection.But systemic science education could cultivate a scientificreasoning habit.Thus,there might be three kinds of reasoning fashions,and they wereendowed with different weight in people's thinking.This theory could explain manyphenomena of conflict in social behavior.It also suggested that if we measured the weightof three reasoning fashions with inductive inference tasks,the result would be used as anindex about people's thinking style.The index may be named as"inductive style".It couldbe used to describe people's personality,and also to predict the other tendency of socialbehavior.