The Expression Of Rules:The Effect Of Positiveness And Negation On Deontic Reasoning

Deontic rules are defined as assertions about permitted behaviors,obligated behaviors,prohibited behaviors and permitted not behaviors.These rules tell us what one ought to do,may do,and ought not to do.Deontic reasoning is about how people reason on these rules.Since the 1980 s,deontic reasoning has become an important area of research in the field of reasoning psychology.Many scholars at home and abroad have studied deontic reasoning and put forward many theories to explain it,such as Pragmatic reasoning schemas,Social Contract Theory,Decision Theory,The theory of Mental Models and so on.Based on a brief review of the main theories and related researches of deontic reasoning at home and abroad,this paper puts forward the hypothesis that deontic reasoning is affected by the expressions of rules.This research mainly through three experiments of reasoning tasks to investigate the influence of expression on moral reasoning.Three experiments are respectively single model reasoning task,disjunctive model reasoning task and conjunctive model reasoning task.Besides,this research also investigates the interaction between rule expressions,rule types and conclusion types.This research mainly adopts permitted rules,obligated rules,prohibited rules and permitted not rules as experiment materials.The problems in three reasoning tasks are set up accordingly MP,DA,AC and MT.Through three experiments,this study mainly draws the following conclusions:(1)The expressions of positiveness and negation have significant effect on deontic reasoning.What is more,the effects are affected by rule types and the conclusion types.In addition,the effects of expressions on the deontic rules are different in the single model deontic task,the disjunctive model deontic task and conjunctive model reasoning task.(2)In the single model deontic task,reactions in the positive expression of deontic reasoning task are more accurate than the negative one.The differencesbetween positive and negative versions are different in the four types of rules,permission > obligation > prohibition > not permission.The differences between the positive and negative versions are also different in the four conclusion types,MP>AC>DA>MT.(3)In the disjunctive model deontic task,reactions in the positive expression of deontic reasoning task are more accurate than the negative one.The differences between positive and negative versions are different in the four types of rules,obligation > not permission > prohibition > permission.The differences between the positive and negative versions are also different in the four conclusion types,MP>AC>DA>MT.(4)In the conjunctive model deontic task,reactions in the negative expression of deontic reasoning task are more accurate than the positive one.The differences between positive and negative versions are different in the four types of rules,prohibition > permission > not permission > obligation.The differences between the positive and negative versions are also different in the four conclusion types,DA >MT > MP >AC.