The class inclusion question: a case study in applying pragmatics to the experimental study of cognition

For more than 70 years, Piaget’s class-inclusion task (given, e.g., five asters and three tulips, the child is asked whether “there are more asters or more flowers”) has been the object of experimental investigation. Inclusion is of considerable importance for cognitive science as it is a key concept for logical operations and knowledge representation. It is shown that the question can be characterised by a kind of privative ambiguity which is at the source of the younger children’s answer, “more asters”. A relevance-theoretic explanation of children’s interpretation of the question and of the subsequent responses is expounded. This account can explain the effect of all the factors that are known to influence performance (e.g., role of collections, counting, typicality, qualification, syntax, etc.), a review of which is presented. It is further tested experimentally. The development of performance is explained on the basis of the way children disambiguate the question. This study exemplifies the two ways in which pragmatic analysis is pertinent to the study of children’s (as well as adults’) reasoning and judgement, namely in explaining and predicting participants’ comprehension of the statements and questions, and in taking into account attribution processes that occur in the experimental setting.