Context and conversation

In the study of human reasoning and rationality, the role of context has been widely discussed and analyzed by the supporters of the conversational or pragmatic approach to the analysis of reasoning performances (e.g., Hilton 1995; Politzer 1986; 2004; Politzer &

Macchi 2000; 2005; Schwarz 1996; for a survey, see Lee 2006). Their pragmatic analyses are, above all, a reaction to the approaches to reasoning performance interpretation and evaluation employed in earlier psychological research on human reasoning. For a long time, researchers have maintained that subjects’ interpretations of the task have always to fit with

the experimenter’s representation of the task and so normative standards have to be appropriate to this representation, regardless of how they understand or interpret the task. It has been implicitly assumed that the task with which subjects are faced is a well-defined one, that is, it explicitly provides all information necessary to solve the task according to the representation the experimenter has assumed to be the right one. As is noted by Evans and Feeney (2004: 78), “any influence of prior knowledge or belief about the problem content or context [has been taken] to be normatively irrelevant to the definition of a correct answer”. Recently, however, these classical assumptions about the interpretation and evaluation of reasoning performances have been widely re-examined and criticized. Several researchers now claim that the evaluation of subjects’ performances on a reasoning task should be always relativized to their interpretation of the task and the conclusions they draw must be evaluated by considering both their goals and the background assumptions that they have selected as relevant to solving the reasoning problem (see, e.g., Evans &

Feeney 2004; Girotto 2004). Such an approach invites a main worry: it could be the case that experimenters are too permissive with respect to the evaluation of subjects’ reasoning performance, that is, they may explain away any normatively inappropriate response by assuming that subjects have interpreted the reasoning problem in ways that are coherent with their responses. If they do so, experimenters deprive standards of rationality of all their normative force (see also Chapter 1, Section 3.5). To prevent that, the supporters of the conversational approach have proposed to explain reasoning performances by appealing to contextual and conversational factors. They consider reasoning as an activity which takes place in a context, be it either linguistic or interpersonal or both, and cannot be detached from it. On this view, the inseparability between reasoning and context is not only a practical concern, but also a theoretical stance.

Supporters of the conversational approach maintain that studying reasoning and rationality from the point of view of pragmatics allows us to discover new factors that are likely to determine subject’s reasoning performances (see Politzer & Macchi 2000; 2005).

In their view, what received approaches have not sufficiently examined is the context which arises from the definition of a problem. Therefore, before any experiment on reasoning can be made, it is necessary to consider the possible ways in which subjects may understand and interpret the reasoning task they are faced with. As Politzer and Macchi (2005 :120) observe, if after a reasoning problem has been analyzed from the point of view of pragmatics, it is discovered that subjects may have understood the reasoning problem in ways that differ from what the experimenter has assumed to be the case, and thereby subjects have approached a problem that has a different nature from that devised by the experimenter, that may have deep consequences on the assessment of subjects’ reasoning performances. In particular, according to Politzer and Macchi (2005: 120-121), experimental tasks for which a normatively correct response has been defined should be examined at two different levels:

One, carried out at a micro-structure level, consists of a linguistic analysis of the premises or of the problem statement in order to make sure that they convey the meaning intended by the experimenter. A typical outcome of such an analysis is the identification of different possible interpretations due to the generation of conversational implicatures […]. The other examination, at a macro-structure level, consists of identifying the representation of the task that participants are likely to build: a typical outcome of this examination is the identification of the kind of skill, knowledge, or ability that participants think they must exhibit in order to satisfy the experimenter’s request.

The second stage of analysis focuses on the relationship between experimenter and subject.

Their relationship is taken to be asymmetrical because it is the subject who tries to understand what the experimenter’s intentions are. However, the intentions of the experimenter are not always completely transparent to the subject and thereby the latter may attribute intentions to the experimenter that may be very different from the experimenter’s expectations. If this occurs without being recognized by the experimenter, the subject’s interpretation of the task may affect the experimenter’s analysis of the results and her evaluation of the subject’s reasoning performance. Such a pragmatic method is situational in the sense that it focuses on situational (experimental) constraints in order to judge the normative appropriateness of subjects’ reasoning performances. The explanatory situation is constituted by the experimenter and her relationship with the subject. Opposing pessimism on human rationality, supporters of the conversational approach hold that, by appealing to contextual and conversational factors, subject responses may be said to be very often “conversationally rational”. As Hilton (1995: 264) points out, “many of the experimental results that have been attributed to faulty reasoning may be reinterpreted as being due to rational interpretations of experimenter-given information”. But what does it mean to be “conversationally rational”? What kind of context do conversationally inspired analyses of reasoning performances imply? At this point, I need to say something more about the nature of the context which is focused upon. Supporters of the conversational approach, as I understand their claims, define the context as the set of assumptions that the reasoner supposes herself to share with the experimenter. Indeed, as seen above, they regard the participant as trying to understand the experimenter’s intentions. These assumptions do not come from the situational context but rather are part of the subjects’

cognitive context.¹ If context amounts to the assumptions that the reasoner takes to be held

1 As regards to pragmatic interpretation, a classical example of context regarded as “cognitive” comes from Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995). In this theory, what counts as context is characterized in terms

in common by herself and the experimenter, then it is fairly internal and cognitive. On this view, a reasoning performance could be regarded as normatively inappropriate only in relation to the reasoner’s reconstruction of the intentions of the experimenter about the reasoning task she is faced with. Doing so, errors in reasoning may be always explained away by appealing to the reasoner’s cognitive assumptions and what we usually consider irrationality may become a conversationally rational way of reconstructing the goal set by the experimenter in the reasoning task. While such accounts are typically optimistic about human rationality, I hold that a contextualist account should not prevent criticism of subjects’ reasoning performances. Indeed, with regard to the same reasoning performance, subjects might be reasoning rationally in conversational terms, and yet be subject to criticism (for example, if the subject’s representation of the task context does not match the contextual information as explicitly presented in the experimental context). It seems to me that in order to provide an appropriate and complete evaluation of human reasoning it is necessary to consider the appropriateness of subjects’ task interpretations. But it is only with respect to something external to the reasoner and independent of her cognitive assumptions, that it makes sense to assess, or attempt to assess, her interpretations. So, if we want to have any normative standards for the evaluation of reasoning performances, then we must also have the means to evaluate the legitimacy of subjects’ task interpretations. To fulfil this need, the conversational account should be integrated into a more general normative framework.