“Soft Bayesians”, for instance proponents of the Hypothetical Inferential Theory (HIT) agree on the importance of uncertainty and subjective degrees of belief in reasoning but reject some aspects of Bayesian orthodoxy ( Douven and Verbrugge, 2012 Douven, 2015, 2017, 2022 Krzyżanowska et al., 2017, 2021 Douven et al., 2018, 2022 Krzyżanowska and Douven, 2018 Mirabile and Douven, 2020). “Strict Bayesians” tend to lean closer toward classical Bayesian precepts, explaining deviations from these norms in terms of interactions with other systems-for example, conversational pragmatics and details of natural language semantics ( Baratgin, 2002 Baratgin and Politzer, 2006 Cruz et al., 2016 Lassiter and Baratgin, 2021 Cruz and Over, 2023 Over and Cruz, 2023). This new paradigm gathers two families of theories that make use of Bayesian concepts in somewhat different ways ( Elqayam and Evans, 2013 Douven et al., 2022). The call by Oaksford and Chater (2001, 2007) for a paradigm shift in the psychological study of reasoning to take into account the probabilistic nature of reasoning has undergone major development in recent years and has provided many explanations for the inferences and representations of logical arguments implemented in everyday life (for comments: Over, 2009, 2020, 2021 Evans, 2012 Elqayam and Over, 2013 Oaksford and Chater, 2013 Baratgin et al., 2015 Johnson-Laird et al., 2015 Baratgin and Politzer, 2016 Elqayam, 2017 Knauff et al., 2021 Oaksford, 2021 Cruz, 2022 Douven, 2022 Johnson-Laird and Khemlani, 2022). This is as expected according to the Bayesian approach together with a general theory of discourse coherence. With one systematic exception that is predicted by prior work in coherence theory, the presence or absence of an inferential link affected conditionals and other statement types in the same way.

Our experiment compared conditionals (“ If A, C”), conjunctions (“ A and C”), and bare juxtapositions (“ A. Bayesian theorists have denied the need for such a requirement, appealing instead to a requirement of discourse coherence that extends to all ways of connecting clauses. According to the Hypothetical Inferential Theory, this is explained by a conventional requirement of an inferential connection between conditional clauses. Missing-link conditionals like “If bats have wings, Paris is in France” are generally felt to be unacceptable even though both clauses are true. 3School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom.2School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, Probability, Assessment, Reasoning and Inferences Studies Association, Paris, France.1Université Paris 8, Laboratoire Cognition Humaine et Artificielle (CHArt, RNSR 200515259U), Saint-Denis, France.

Maxime Bourlier 1 Baptiste Jacquet 1,2 Daniel Lassiter 3 Jean Baratgin 1,2 *

Coherence theory theory