Reasoning With Deontic And Counterfactual Conditionals In College Students

Conditional reasoning is an inference whose antecedent is an conditional, which has four inferences: MP, MT, DA and AC. Most research on conditional inference has focused on conditionals in the indicative mood about factual possibilities. But recent attention has focused on two major categories of non-indicative conditionals: deontic conditionals that refer to permissions and obligations, and subjunctive conditionals that refer to counter- factual situations that were once possible but are so no longer. Based on the achievements and deficiencies of past studies, the present research made an investigation on the inference models in deontic conditioal, counterfactual conditional and deontic and counterfactual conditional from the perspective of deontic and counterfactual conditions. Our aim in this paper is to examine conditionals that are both deontic and subjunctive. Thus, to some extent, it can enrich the relative studies at home and abroad, and also afford some empirical evidence to school teaching and mental health work.The research randomly adopted 375 subjects from the school of foreign studies and the school of management. It used experimental method to make an investigation on the inference modal of deontic conditional, counterfactual conditional and deontic and counterfactual condituonal. Using ANOVA with repeated measures to analyze the data, we can find that :1. For conditionals with deontic content , reasoners make more modus tollens inferences compared to conditionals with epistemic content. 2. For conditionals in the subjunctive mood with deontic content, reasoners make the same frequency of all inferences as they do for conditionals in the indicative mood with deontic content.3. We suggest that counterfactual deontic conditionals depend on more than linguistic mood. Reasoners make more MT inference.In this regard, subjunctive deontics are different from subjunctive epistemic conditionals: reasoners interpret subjunctive epistemic conditionals as counter-factual and they make more negative inferences such as modus tollens from them. The experiments show these two phenomena occur for deontic conditionals that contain the modal auxiliary "must" and ones that do not. We discuss the results in terms of the mental representations of deontic conditionals and of counterfactual conditionals.Subjunctive deontic conditionals are an important and unique sort of conditional which has not been examined before, despite the fact that people often generate counterfactual thoughts that spontaneously focus on violations of social regulations .This first investigation of subjunctive deontics indicates that they can shed light on the nature of reasoning with both deontic conditionals and counterfactual conditionals.