Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

People often reason about omissions. One line of researchshows that people can distinguish between the semantics ofomissive causes and omissive enabling conditions: forinstance, not flunking out of college enabled you (but didn’tcause you) to graduate. Another line of work shows that peoplerely on the normative status of omissive events in inferringtheir causal role: if the outcome came about because theomission violated some norm, reasoners are more likely toselect that omission as a cause. We designed a novel paradigmthat tests how norms interact with the semantics of omissiveenabling conditions. The paradigm concerns the circuitry of amechanical device that plays music. Two experiments used theparadigm to stipulate norms and present a distinct set ofpossibilities to participants. Participants chose which causalverb best described the operations of the machine. The studiesrevealed that participants’ responses are best predicted by theirtendency to consider the semantics of omissive relations. Incontrast, norms had little to no effect in participants’ responses.We conclude by marshaling the evidence and considering whatrole norms may play in people’s understanding of omissions.