Ups and downs in syllogistic reasoning
Bart Geurts, Frans W. P. Van der Slik · 2005
The difficulty of a syllogistic argument is affected by the meanings of the quantifiers it contains and the way they are arranged. A quantifier may be upward entailing (i.e. license inferences from subsets to supersets) or downward entailing (i.e. license inferences from supersets to subsets). We present data showing that sentences and arguments containing both types of quantifier are more difficult than others. Furthermore, inferences from subsets to supersets turn out to be easier than inferences that go in the opposite direction.