Reasoning about rights and duties: mental models, world knowledge and pragmatic interpretation

Abstract

We address the way verb-based and rule-content knowledge are combined in understanding institutional deontics. Study 1 showed that the institutional regulations used in our studies were readily categorised into one of two content groups: rights or duties. Participants perceived rights as benefiting the addressees identified by the rule, whereas they perceived duties as benefiting the collective that imposed the rule. Studies 2, 3, and 4 showed that rule content (rights vs. duties) had clear effects on perceptions of violations and relevance of cases for explaining the rule, even when controlling for deontic verb, phrasing of the action permitted by a right, or the formality of the deontic verb. These effects are incompatible with a simple pragmatic disambiguation approach to pragmatic modulation, as they often induce permissibility judgments that contradict the core semantic meanings of the deontic verbs. Other ways of reconciling verb meaning with rule content should be considered in a fuller theory of the interpretation of institutional rules.

Keywords:

• Deontic reasoning
• pragmatic modulation
• mental models
• scripts

Acknowledgements

We thank Annette Burguet, Bertrand Fauré, Bertrand Monthubert and Anne Vanhems for their help in the collection of the data reported in this paper, and David Over for helpful discussions at all stages of this research. We also thank the editor, Ruth Byrne, Shira Elqayam, Douglas Medin and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Portions of these data were reported at the Birkbeck Thinking Workshop, London, in August 2008.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ It is of course possible to imagine contexts in which statements such as Users of public transport must not hold a transport pass can make sense, a point we return to in the discussion. Our point here is simply that this kind of semantic contradiction cannot be handled by a pragmatic disambiguation approach to pragmatic modulation.

² Two of the rules were slightly modified to make them sound more common and comprehensible in French:

“Branch managers who make credits to clients have the duty/ the right to increase the interest the rates offered to those clients”. (rather than “Bankers who make credits… to increase the interest the rates”)

“Nurses who do the day shift have the duty/ the right to attend adult professional training”.

(rather than “Nurses who do the day-work… to attend the adjournment course”).

³ We give English translations of the French rules, themselves translated from Bucciarelli and Johnson-Laird's originals, and have focused on equivalence of meaning rather than literal equivalence. For this reason, we translate the original Italian version of the rule as “adult professional training” rather than “adjournment course”.

⁴ Technically speaking, the expression may not would be more accurate and closer to the French translation peuvent ne pas, when interpreted as Those who cannot swim are allowed not to attend swimming class tomorrow. However, the English expression Those who cannot swim may not attend swimming class tomorrow is often heard as an interdiction. We thus choose to use need not as a practical shorthand which is readily understandable, as it is always closer to the first meaning of English is allowed not to, which is conveyed by French peut ne pas.

⁵ When reporting empirical results we use italic lower case letters (a, not-a, b, not-b) that correspond to the logical cases described in upper case in the introduction (A, not-A, B, not-B).

⁶ A series of chi-square tests were run to identify which modal operator would elicit the highest level of impermissibility judgments for each logical case. Bonferroni corrections were applied to adjust the p-values of all tests, following a procedure recommended by Keppel and Wickens (2004). Specifically, for Studies 2, 3, and 4: the p-values were multiplied by 8 when comparisons were made for rights and duties separately and multiplied by 16 when rights were additionally compared with duties.

⁷ We checked whether the choice of verb influenced perceptions of permissibility for rights. The only overall significantly different pattern of response found was that participants in Study 2 (“receive” version) tended to infer more frequently that not-a, not-b cases were impermissible (χ2 (1) = 4.24, p < .05, N = 286). However, when controlling for verbs, we did find the effect we had hypothesised but only for the modals “may” and “must not”. When the modal “may” was used, a, not-b cases were more frequently considered impermissible in Study 2 (i.e. when the verb ‘receive’ was used) than in Study 3 (i.e., when the verb “claim” was used) (p < .038, one-tailed); whereas for statements involving the modal “must not”, not-a, b cases were more frequently considered impermissible in Study 3 (verb “claim”) (p < .031, one-tailed). These results tend to support the prediction that wording may influence concern for different types of cheating.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Agence National de la Recherche [grant number NT05-4_45862]. Laetitia Charalambides is now at the University of Lausanne, Unicentre, CH-1015, Switzerland.