Introduction

Explanations in the deductive mode

In the deductive mode, a judgement or conclusion is explained or justified in terms of some form of evidence. The evidence may be observable, or it may take the form of a rule or of a ‘given’ fact. The role of the causal connectives in deductive sentences is to make explicit the links in the deductive process, rather than the causal relations between events. However, a deductive explanation may draw on the speaker's knowledge of the types of causal relations between events which are made explicit in empirical explanations. For example, the deductive explanation expressed by the sentence:

presupposes the physical relation which is made explicit in the sentence:

Similarly, the deductive sentence:

presupposes the psychological relation expressed by:

Thus, deductive explanations may have physical content (as in (6.1)) or psychological content (as in (6.3)). Alternatively, they may have logical content, as in:

Most of the previous research on children's understanding of the causal connectives has either been based solely on the empirical mode or has compared empirical sentences to deductive sentences with logical content.