Epistemic verbs produce spatial models

Verbs such as ‘know’ and ‘think’ help people describe mental states, and reasoners without any training in logic can make epistemic inferences about mental states. For instance, verbs such as ‘know’ are factive, i.e., they describe true propositions, and the statement Aliyah knows that it’s cloudy licenses the inference that it’s cloudy. Logicians have accordingly developed epistemic logics capable of characterizing valid and invalid epistemic inferences based on operators that serve as analogs to verbs such as ‘know’ and ‘think’. Recent work suggests that no existing logical system can capture the inferences that naïve individuals tend to make. This paper describes a new theory of epistemic reasoning that operates on the assumption that reasoners represent epistemic relations as spatial models. The theory accords with recent theoretical advances, existing data, as well as two novel experiments that show how reasoners cope with nested epistemic verbs, e.g., Aliyah knows that Mo thinks it’s cloudy.

动词如‘知道’和‘思考’有助于人们描述心理状态，即便未经逻辑训练的推理者亦能就心理状态作出认知推断。例如，‘知道’这类动词具有事实性，即它们描述的是真命题，而阿里亚知道天空中多云的陈述则允许推导出天空多云的结论。逻辑学家据此发展出能够基于诸如‘知道’和‘思考’等动词的类比运算符来刻画有效与无效认知推断的认知逻辑。近期研究指出，现有逻辑系统尚无法捕捉到普通人常有的推断。本文描述了一种新的认知推理理论，该理论基于这样的假设，即推理者将认知关系视为空间模型进行表征。该理论与近年来的理论进展、现有数据以及两项新颖实验相契合，这些实验展示了推理者如何处理嵌套的认知动词，例如阿里亚知道莫认为天空多云。