The Distortion of Syllogistic Reasoning Produced by Personal Convictions
The Distortion of Syllogistic Reasoning Produced by Personal Convictions
复制标题
个人信念造成的三段论推理的扭曲
DOI：
10.1080/00224545.1944.9918830
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发表时间：
1944
影响因子：
2.1
通讯作者：
J. T. Morton
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Morgan;J. T. Morton
人们普遍认为，尽管有旨在改变自己坚定信念的证据和论据，但坚定的个人信念仍可能得到维持。“一个违背自己意愿的人仍然持有同样的观点。”人们还广泛认识到，一个人会出于热心编造虚构的理由或使用不合理的论据来支持他的偏见过程，心理学家称之为合理化。另一方面，没有证据表明，正确推理的实际能力会受到个人信念的干扰。当一个人听到一个似乎是基于辩论者想要支持某个结论的不合理论证时，永远不清楚他是否真的无法正确推理，或者他的推理是否是为了使他的立场看起来合乎逻辑而故意歪曲。这表明，即使向受试者提出三段论，其中的术语是抽象符号或几乎没有个人意义的具体术语，他也很难选择正确的结论。在这种情况下，他的结论更有可能是基于三段论的结构，而不是基于正确的推论。此外，将提供证据表明，当三段论中的术语与推理者的个人信念相关时，扭曲变得更加明显。一个人可能会接受一个表达了他的信念的结论，而很少考虑所涉及的推论的正确性或错误性。我们的证据将表明，我们可以相对确定一个人的推论是合乎逻辑的唯一情况是当它们得出他已经接受的结论时。这种调查仅限于推理形式，其中受试者利用两个前提，要求他通过称为直接推理的过程得出结论。这种推理的标准形式被称为三段论，一个经典的例子是：
It is a commonly accepted belief that firmly held personal convictions are likely to be maintained in spite of evidence and arguments designed to change them.“A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still.” It has also been widely recognized that a man will invent fictitious reasons or use unsound arguments in his zeal to support his prejudiceea process which psychologists have called rationalization, On the other hand, it has not been shown that it is the actual ability to reason correctly which is disturbed by personal convictions. When one hears an unsound argument which seems to be based on the desire of the debater to support a certain conclusion, it is never quite clear whether he is really unable to reason correctly or whether his reasoning is a wilful attempt to distort in order to make his position seem logical.It shows that even when a subject is presented with a syllogism in which the terms are abstract symbols or concrete terms which have little or no personal significance, he has difficulty in selecting the correct conclusion. Under such circumstances his conclusion is more likely to be based on the structure of the syllogism than upon correct inference. Moreover, evidence will be presented which shows that distortion becomes much more marked when the terms in the syllogism are related to the personal convictions of the reasoner. A person is likely to accept a conclusion which expresses his convictions with little regard for the correctness or incorrectness of the inferences involved. Our evidence will indicate that the only circumstance under which we can be relatively sure that the inferences of a person will be logical is when they lead to a conclusion which he has already accepted. This investigation is limited to that form of reasoning in which the subject makes use of two premises from which he is required to draw a conclusion by the process known as immediate inference. The standard form of such reasoning is known as the syllogism, a classical example of which is: