On Worldwide Ladies’s Day we’re delighted to host a analysis publish by María Caamaño-Alegre (College of Valladolid). Right this moment she is presenting her new paper, “On Glasses Half Full or Half Empty: Understanding Framing Effects in Terms of Default Implicatures“, revealed in Synthese in 2021.
| María Caamaño-Alegre |
Will we desire our glasses half full to half empty? If that’s the case, is it rational that now we have such desire? It is an empirically well-established incontrovertible fact that topics’ preferences change relying on whether or not the described choices are framed both positively or negatively. The variations in how topics reply to positively or negatively framed descriptions of the identical subject are referred to as “framing results”, and so they have historically been understood as indicators of irrationality.
Framing results appear to be in battle with the normative precept often referred to as the “precept of extensionality” or the “invariance precept”, which is a typical assumption in rational alternative principle. In line with this precept, alternative ways of presenting the identical set of attainable choices mustn’t change the themes’ selections with respect to these choices.
The pioneering research by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman make clear the way in which people course of data, by emphasizing the connection between optimistic/unfavourable framing and the interpretation of the framed choices when it comes to features or losses. Nonetheless, the underlying semantic-pragmatic nature of this phenomenon is just not analyzed by them and, with few exceptions, stays unexplored.
My paper examines the semantic-pragmatic options of framing results, thereby providing a unifying rationalization of them when it comes to default implicatures, that are interpretations including data to that actually conveyed by a sentence. The shared cultural background relating to commonplace makes use of of frames triggers a default interpretation within the following phrases: for unfavourable frames, unfavourable means unbelievable and unfavourable, which in flip means worse than typical; for optimistic frames, optimistic means unbelievable and optimistic, which in flip means higher than typical.
This view of framing results has essential implications for the rationality/irrationality debate, because it reveals that the completely different default implicatures conveyed by different frames appear related for judgement on the described choices. It thus strengthens the arguments opposing the normal understanding of the precept of invariance.
Furthermore, further causes are additionally supplied to assist the rationality of framing results, since as soon as the normative precept of invariance is reformulated to be delicate to the implicit data conveyed by frames, framing results can not be thought-about as violations of such precept. As a consequence, my account shifts the main focus of the controversy, from rationality or irrationality of judgement (or alternative) to that of interpretation, for the central query to pursue is: when is it rational to interpret on the premise of defaults?
In the end, my evaluation paves the way in which for a unified account of framing results, exhibiting the connection between beforehand unrelated explanations invoking completely different cognitive heuristics and biases. It additionally reveals the importance of supplementing economical-psychological approaches with linguistic-philosophical ones, encouraging additional work on this space.
