Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

No present theory explains or models the inferences peopledraw about the real world when reasoning about “bouletic”relations, i.e., predicates that express desires, such as want inLee wants to be in love. Linguistic accounts of such bouleticrelations define them in terms of their relation to a desirer’sbeliefs, and how its complement is deemed desirable (cf.Heim, 1992; Villalta, 2008; Rubinstein 2012). In contrast, wedescribe a new model-based theory (cf. Johnson-Laird, 2006;Khemlani, Byrne, & Johnson-Laird, 2018) that posits that suchpredicates are fundamentally counterfactual in nature. Inparticular, X wants P should imply that P is not the case,because you cannot want what is already true. The theorymakes empirical predictions about how people assess theconsistency of bouletic relations as well as how they use suchrelations to eliminate disjunctive possibilities. Twoexperiments tested and validated the theory’s centralpredictions. We assess the theory in light of alternativeaccounts of human reasoning.