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  1. Rational Polarization.Kevin Dorst - 2023 - Philosophical Review 132 (3):355-458.
    Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity (...)
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  • (2 other versions)Normativity and epistemic intuitions.Jonathan M. Weinberg, Shaun Nichols & Stephen Stich - 2001 - Philosophical Topics, 29 (1-2):429-460.
    In this paper we propose to argue for two claims. The first is that a sizeable group of epistemological projects – a group which includes much of what has been done in epistemology in the analytic tradition – would be seriously undermined if one or more of a cluster of empirical hypotheses about epistemic intuitions turns out to be true. The basis for this claim will be set out in Section 2. The second claim is that, while the jury is (...)
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  • (1 other version)Intuition and the Autonomy of Philosophy.George Bealer - 1998 - In Michael Raymond DePaul & William M. Ramsey (eds.), Rethinking Intuition: The Psychology of Intuition and its Role in Philosophical Inquiry. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 201-240.
    The phenomenology of a priori intuition is explored at length (where a priori intuition is taken to be not a form of belief but rather a form of seeming, specifically intellectual as opposed to sensory seeming). Various reductive accounts of intuition are criticized, and Humean empiricism (which, unlike radical empiricism, does admit analyticity intuitions as evidence) is shown to be epistemically self-defeating. This paper also recapitulates the defense of the thesis of the Autonomy and Authority of Philosophy given in the (...)
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  • Intentional systems in cognitive ethology: The 'panglossian paradigm' defended.Daniel C. Dennett - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):343-90.
    Ethologists and others studying animal behavior in a spirit are in need of a descriptive language and method that are neither anachronistically bound by behaviorist scruples nor prematurely committed to particular Just such an interim descriptive method can be found in intentional system theory. The use of intentional system theory is illustrated with the case of the apparently communicative behavior of vervet monkeys. A way of using the theory to generate data - including usable, testable data - is sketched. The (...)
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  • Interpretation psychologized.Alvin I. Goldman - 1989 - Mind and Language 4 (3):161-85.
    The aim of this paper is to study interpretation, specifically, to work toward an account of interpretation that seems descriptively and explanatorily correct. No account of interpretation can be philosophically helpful, I submit, if it is incompatible with a correct account of what people actually do when they interpret others. My question, then, is: how does the (naive) interpreter arrive at his/her judgments about the mental attitudes of others? Philosophers who have addressed this question have not, in my view, been (...)
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  • Explanatory coherence (plus commentary).Paul Thagard - 1989 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12 (3):435-467.
    This target article presents a new computational theory of explanatory coherence that applies to the acceptance and rejection of scientific hypotheses as well as to reasoning in everyday life, The theory consists of seven principles that establish relations of local coherence between a hypothesis and other propositions. A hypothesis coheres with propositions that it explains, or that explain it, or that participate with it in explaining other propositions, or that offer analogous explanations. Propositions are incoherent with each other if they (...)
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  • A rational analysis of the selection task as optimal data selection.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 1994 - Psychological Review 101 (4):608-631.
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  • Précis of bayesian rationality: The probabilistic approach to human reasoning.Mike Oaksford & Nick Chater - 2009 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32 (1):69-84.
    According to Aristotle, humans are the rational animal. The borderline between rationality and irrationality is fundamental to many aspects of human life including the law, mental health, and language interpretation. But what is it to be rational? One answer, deeply embedded in the Western intellectual tradition since ancient Greece, is that rationality concerns reasoning according to the rules of logic – the formal theory that specifies the inferential connections that hold with certainty between propositions. Piaget viewed logical reasoning as defining (...)
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  • The folk concept of intentional action: Philosophical and experimental issues.Edouard Machery - 2008 - Mind and Language 23 (2):165–189.
    Recent experimental fi ndings by Knobe and others ( Knobe, 2003; Nadelhoffer, 2006b; Nichols and Ulatowski, 2007 ) have been at the center of a controversy about the nature of the folk concept of intentional action. I argue that the signifi cance of these fi ndings has been overstated. My discussion is two-pronged. First, I contend that barring a consensual theory of conceptual competence, the signifi cance of these experimental fi ndings for the nature of the concept of intentional action (...)
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  • Moral heuristics.Cass R. Sunstein - 2005 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28 (4):531-542.
    With respect to questions of fact, people use heuristics – mental short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that generally work well, but that also lead to systematic errors. People use moral heuristics too – moral short-cuts, or rules of thumb, that lead to mistaken and even absurd moral judgments. These judgments are highly relevant not only to morality, but to law and politics as well. Examples are given from a number of domains, including risk regulation, punishment, reproduction and sexuality, and the (...)
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  • Why bounded rationality (in epistemology)?David Thorstad - 2024 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (2):396-413.
    Bounded rationality gets a bad rap in epistemology. It is argued that theories of bounded rationality are overly context‐sensitive; conventionalist; or dependent on ordinary language (Carr, 2022; Pasnau, 2013). In this paper, I have three aims. The first is to set out and motivate an approach to bounded rationality in epistemology inspired by traditional theories of bounded rationality in cognitive science. My second aim is to show how this approach can answer recent challenges raised for theories of bounded rationality. My (...)
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  • Subtracting “ought” from “is”: Descriptivism versus normativism in the study of human thinking.Shira Elqayam & Jonathan St B. T. Evans - 2011 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 34 (5):233-248.
    We propose a critique ofnormativism, defined as the idea that human thinking reflects a normative system against which it should be measured and judged. We analyze the methodological problems associated with normativism, proposing that it invites the controversial “is-ought” inference, much contested in the philosophical literature. This problem is triggered when there are competing normative accounts (the arbitration problem), as empirical evidence can help arbitrate between descriptive theories, but not between normative systems. Drawing on linguistics as a model, we propose (...)
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  • On the reality of cognitive illusions.Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky - 1996 - Psychological Review 103 (3):582-591.
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  • Rational belief.Henry E. Kyburg - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (2):231-245.
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  • On narrow norms and vague heuristics: A reply to Kahneman and Tversky.Gerd Gigerenzer - 1996 - Psychological Review 103 (3):592-596.
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  • Is human cognition adaptive?John R. Anderson - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (3):471-485.
    Can the output of human cognition be predicted from the assumption that it is an optimal response to the information-processing demands of the environment? A methodology called rational analysis is described for deriving predictions about cognitive phenomena using optimization assumptions. The predictions flow from the statistical structure of the environment and not the assumed structure of the mind. Bayesian inference is used, assuming that people start with a weak prior model of the world which they integrate with experience to develop (...)
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  • Delusions and madmen: against rationality constraints on belief.Declan Smithies, Preston Lennon & Richard Samuels - 2022 - Synthese 200 (3):1-30.
    According to the Rationality Constraint, our concept of belief imposes limits on how much irrationality is compatible with having beliefs at all. We argue that empirical evidence of human irrationality from the psychology of reasoning and the psychopathology of delusion undermines only the most demanding versions of the Rationality Constraint, which require perfect rationality as a condition for having beliefs. The empirical evidence poses no threat to more relaxed versions of the Rationality Constraint, which only require only minimal rationality. Nevertheless, (...)
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  • Without Good Reason: The Rationality Debate in Philosophy and Cognitive Science.Edward Stein - 1996 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press UK.
    Are humans rational? Various experiments performed over the last several decades have been interpreted as showing that humans are irrational we make significant and consistent errors in logical reasoning, probabilistic reasoning, similarity judgements, and risk-assessment, to name a few areas. But can these experiments establish human irrationality, or is it a conceptual truth that humans must be rational, as various philosophers have argued? In this book, Edward Stein offers a clear critical account of this debate about rationality in philosophy and (...)
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  • Being Rational and Being Wrong.Kevin Dorst - 2023 - Philosophers' Imprint 23 (1).
    Do people tend to be overconfident? Many think so. They’ve run studies on whether people are calibrated: whether their average confidence in their opinions matches the proportion of those opinions that are true. Under certain conditions, people are systematically ‘over-calibrated’—for example, of the opinions they’re 80% confident in, only 60% are true. From this empirical over-calibration, it’s inferred that people are irrationally overconfident. My question: When and why is this inference warranted? Answering it requires articulating a general connection between being (...)
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  • Reflective equilibrium, analytic epistemology and the problem of cognitive diversity.Stephen Stich - 1988 - Synthese 74 (3):391-413.
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  • Free Will and Epistemology: a Defence of the Transcendental Argument for Freedom.Robert Lockie - 2018 - London, UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
    This is a work concerned with justification and freedom and the relationship between these. Its summational aim is to defend a transcendental argument for free will – that we could not be epistemically justified in undermining a strong notion of free will, as a strong notion of free will would be required for any such process of undermining to be itself epistemically justified. The book advances two transcendental arguments – for a deontically internalist conception of epistemic justification and the aforementioned (...)
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  • The base rate fallacy reconsidered: Descriptive, normative, and methodological challenges.Jonathan J. Koehler - 1996 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19 (1):1-17.
    We have been oversold on the base rate fallacy in probabilistic judgment from an empirical, normative, and methodological standpoint. At the empirical level, a thorough examination of the base rate literature (including the famous lawyer–engineer problem) does not support the conventional wisdom that people routinely ignore base rates. Quite the contrary, the literature shows that base rates are almost always used and that their degree of use depends on task structure and representation. Specifically, base rates play a relatively larger role (...)
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  • Could man be an irrational animal?Stephen P. Stich - 1985 - Synthese 64 (1):115-35.
    1. When we attribute beliefs, desires, and other states of common sense psychology to a person, or for that matter to an animal or an artifact, we are assuming or presupposing that the person or object can be treated as an intentional system. 2. An intentional system is one which is rational through and through; its beliefs are those it ought to have, given its perceptual capacities, its epistemic needs, and its biography…. Its desires are those it ought to have, (...)
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  • Questions and challenges for the new psychology of reasoning.Jonathan St B. T. Evans - 2012 - Thinking and Reasoning 18 (1):5 - 31.
    In common with a number of other authors I believe that there has been a paradigm shift in the psychology of reasoning, specifically the area traditionally labelled as the study of deduction. The deduction paradigm was founded in a philosophical tradition that assumed logicality as the basis for rational thought, and provided binary propositional logic as the agreed normative framework. By contrast, many contemporary authors assume that people have degrees of uncertainty in both premises and conclusions, and reject binary logic (...)
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  • Distinguishing the reflective, algorithmic, and autonomous minds: Is it time for a tri-process theory.Keith E. Stanovich - 2009 - In Jonathan St B. T. Evans & Keith Frankish (eds.), In Two Minds: Dual Processes and Beyond. Oxford University Press. pp. 55--88.
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  • Coherence and Knowability.Luis Rosa - 2022 - The Philosophical Quarterly 72 (4):960-978.
    Why should we avoid incoherence? An influential view tells us that incoherent combinations of attitudes are such that it is impossible for all of those attitudes to be simultaneously vindicated by the evidence. But it is not clear whether this view successfully explains what is wrong with certain akratic doxastic states. In this paper I flesh out an alternative response to that question, one according to which the problem with incoherent combinations of attitudes is that it is impossible for all (...)
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  • Reflective Equilibrium Without Intuitions?Georg Brun - 2014 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17 (2):237-252.
    In moral epistemology, the method of reflective equilibrium is often characterized in terms of intuitions or understood as a method for justifying intuitions. An analysis of reflective equilibrium and current theories of moral intuitions reveals that this picture is problematic. Reflective equilibrium cannot be adequately characterized in terms of intuitions. Although the method presupposes that we have initially credible commitments, it does not presuppose that they are intuitions. Nonetheless, intuitions can enter the process of developing a reflective equilibrium and, if (...)
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  • Nonconsequentialist decisions.Jonathan Baron - 1994 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 17 (1):1-10. Translated by Jonathan Baron.
    According to a simple form of consequentialism, we should base decisions on our judgments about their consequences for achieving our goals. Our goals give us reason to endorse consequentialism as a standard of decision making. Alternative standards invariably lead to consequences that are less good in this sense. Yet some people knowingly follow decision rules that violate consequentialism. For example, they prefer harmful omissions to less harmful acts, they favor the status quo over alternatives they would otherwise judge to be (...)
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  • Scientific rationality and human reasoning.Miriam Solomon - 1992 - Philosophy of Science 59 (3):439-455.
    The work of Tversky, Kahneman and others suggests that people often make use of cognitive heuristics such as availability, salience and representativeness in their reasoning and decision making. Through use of a historical example--the recent plate tectonics revolution in geology--I argue that such heuristics play a crucial role in scientific decision making also. I suggest how these heuristics are to be considered, along with noncognitive factors (such as motivation and social structures) when drawing historical and epistemological conclusions. The normative perspective (...)
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  • A Ranking‐Theoretic Approach to Conditionals.Wolfgang Spohn - 2013 - Cognitive Science 37 (6):1074-1106.
    Conditionals somehow express conditional beliefs. However, conditional belief is a bi-propositional attitude that is generally not truth-evaluable, in contrast to unconditional belief. Therefore, this article opts for an expressivistic semantics for conditionals, grounds this semantics in the arguably most adequate account of conditional belief, that is, ranking theory, and dismisses probability theory for that purpose, because probabilities cannot represent belief. Various expressive options are then explained in terms of ranking theory, with the intention to set out a general interpretive scheme (...)
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  • Lloyd Morgan's canon in evolutionary context.Michael T. Ghiselin - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):362-363.
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  • Elementary errors about evolution.Richard C. Lewontin - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):367-368.
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  • Rationality and charity.Paul Thagard & Richard E. Nisbett - 1983 - Philosophy of Science 50 (2):250-267.
    Quine and others have recommended principles of charity which discourage judgments of irrationality. Such principles have been proposed to govern translation, psychology, and economics. After comparing principles of charity of different degrees of severity, we argue that the stronger principles are likely to block understanding of human behavior and impede progress toward improving it. We support a moderate principle of charity which leaves room for empirically justified judgments of irrationality.
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  • A framework for the unification of the behavioral sciences.Herbert Gintis - 2007 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 30 (1):1-16.
    The various behavioral disciplines model human behavior in distinct and incompatible ways. Yet, recent theoretical and empirical developments have created the conditions for rendering coherent the areas of overlap of the various behavioral disciplines. The analytical tools deployed in this task incorporate core principles from several behavioral disciplines. The proposed framework recognizes evolutionary theory, covering both genetic and cultural evolution, as the integrating principle of behavioral science. Moreover, if decision theory and game theory are broadened to encompass other-regarding preferences, they (...)
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  • On the study of statistical intuitions.Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky - 1982 - Cognition 11 (2):123-141.
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  • Reasoning and rationality.K. Manktelow & David E. Over - 1987 - Mind and Language 2 (3):199-219.
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  • Cognitive Success: A Consequentialist Account of Rationality in Cognition.Gerhard Schurz & Ralph Hertwig - 2019 - Topics in Cognitive Science 11 (1):7-36.
    One of the most discussed issues in psychology—presently and in the past—is how to define and measure the extent to which human cognition is rational. The rationality of human cognition is often evaluated in terms of normative standards based on a priori intuitions. Yet this approach has been challenged by two recent developments in psychology that we review in this article: ecological rationality and descriptivism. Going beyond these contributions, we consider it a good moment for psychologists and philosophers to join (...)
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  • Morality justifies motivated reasoning in the folk ethics of belief.Corey Cusimano & Tania Lombrozo - 2021 - Cognition 209 (C):104513.
    When faced with a dilemma between believing what is supported by an impartial assessment of the evidence (e.g., that one's friend is guilty of a crime) and believing what would better fulfill a moral obligation (e.g., that the friend is innocent), people often believe in line with the latter. But is this how people think beliefs ought to be formed? We addressed this question across three studies and found that, across a diverse set of everyday situations, people treat moral considerations (...)
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  • Epistemic norms.John L. Pollock - 1987 - Synthese 71 (1):61 - 95.
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  • Science as an international system.Arthur C. Danto - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):359-360.
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  • A better way to deal with selection.B. F. Skinner - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):377-378.
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  • From the descriptive to the normative in psychology and logic.Paul Thagard - 1982 - Philosophy of Science 49 (1):24-42.
    The aim of this paper is to describe a methodology for revising logical principles in the light of empirical psychological findings. Historical philosophy of science and wide reflective equilibrium in ethics are considered as providing possible models for arguing from the descriptive to the normative. Neither is adequate for the psychology/logic case, and a new model is constructed, employing criteria for evaluating inferential systems. Once we have such criteria, the notion of reflective equilibrium becomes redundant.
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  • Basic emotions, rationality, and folk theory.P. N. Johnson-Laird & Keith Oatley - 1992 - Cognition and Emotion 6 (3-4):201-223.
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  • The quest for optimality: A positive heuristic of science?Paul J. H. Schoemaker - 1991 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14 (2):205-215.
    This paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of one of science's most pervasive and flexible metaprinciples;optimalityis used to explain utility maximization in economics, least effort principles in physics, entropy in chemistry, and survival of the fittest in biology. Fermat's principle of least time involves both teleological and causal considerations, two distinct modes of explanation resting on poorly understood psychological primitives. The rationality heuristic in economics provides an example from social science of the potential biases arising from the extreme flexibility of (...)
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  • Epistemic value.William G. Lycan - 1985 - Synthese 64 (2):137 - 164.
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  • Inductive reasoning: Competence or skill?Christopher Jepson, David H. Krantz & Richard E. Nisbett - 1983 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (3):494.
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  • Human reasoning: Some possible effects of availability.P. Pollard - 1982 - Cognition 12 (1):65-96.
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  • Normative theories of argumentation: are some norms better than others?Adam Corner & Ulrike Hahn - 2013 - Synthese 190 (16):3579-3610.
    Norms—that is, specifications of what we ought to do—play a critical role in the study of informal argumentation, as they do in studies of judgment, decision-making and reasoning more generally. Specifically, they guide a recurring theme: are people rational? Though rules and standards have been central to the study of reasoning, and behavior more generally, there has been little discussion within psychology about why (or indeed if) they should be considered normative despite the considerable philosophical literature that bears on this (...)
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  • Belief, Credence and Statistical Evidence.Davide Fassio & Jie Gao - 2020 - Theoria 86 (4):500-527.
    According to the Rational Threshold View, a rational agent believes p if and only if her credence in p is equal to or greater than a certain threshold. One of the most serious challenges for this view is the problem of statistical evidence: statistical evidence is often not sufficient to make an outright belief rational, no matter how probable the target proposition is given such evidence. This indicates that rational belief is not as sensitive to statistical evidence as rational credence. (...)
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  • Are people programmed to commit fallacies? Further thoughts about the interpretation of experimental data on probability judgment.L. Jonathan Cohen - 1982 - Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 12 (3):251–274.
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