ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on affirmative disjunctives in order to establish performance on the basic truth table and inference tasks. Disjunctives are probably best understood in terms of their defining truth tables. There are striking similarities between disjunctives and conditionals. Linguists have for some years studied the interpretations given to disjunctives. Psychological research into the interpretation of disjunctives has been carried out mainly by S. Fillenbaum. He utilised a variety of techniques to investigate subjects’ interpretations, including memory, paraphrasing and strangeness judgements. A technique commonly used with children has been to use disjunctive statements to describe the contents of a box and to ask children to indicate whether the statement is an appropriate description of the contents. Johnson-Laird et al. have investigated a more complicated type of disjunctive reasoning problem which they term double disjunctions.
