Work

Competent Deontic Reasoning: The Abstract Deontic Selection Task Revisited

Year: 2012
Type: article
Abstract: The abstract deontic selection task was developed with the aim of demonstrating abstract rule use in a specific domain (i.e., deontic rules). Yet, the solution rate, while being substantially higher than with abstract non-deontic tasks, did not reach the level obtained with concrete deontic tasks. What are the rea-sons for this—difficulties with abstract rule use? A task analy-sis based on deontic principles uncovers several problems with the formulation of the task. Three experiments replicate the difficulties with the original task and show that performance increases, when the problems are resolved. The results provide novel insights into the interpretation of deontic rules and into the role that such content-specific, but abstract tasks can play for the study of reasoning processes.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2397523379
FWCI: 0.581
Cites: 14
Cited by: 2
Related to: 10