This paper considers undecidability in the imitation game, the so-called Turing Test. In the Turing Test, a human, a machine, and an interrogator are the players of the game. In our model of the Turing Test, the machine and the interrogator are formalized as Turing machines, allowing us to derive several impossibility results concerning the capabilities of the interrogator. The key issue is that the validity of the Turing test is not attributed to the capability of human or machine, but (...) rather to the capability of the interrogator. In particular, it is shown that no Turing machine can be a perfect interrogator. We also discuss meta-imitation game and imitation game with analog interfaces where both the imitator and the interrogator are mimicked by continuous dynamical systems. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to demonstrate the ways in which the past matters for ethnic conflict in the present. More specifically, by presenting a sociocognitive approach to the problem, this article sets out to specify macro-micro bridging mechanisms that explain why a history of prior conflict is likely to increase the likelihood that new conflicts will erupt. People's inclination toward simplified and/or invalid inductive reasoning in the form of analogism, and their innate disposition for ordering events in teleological (...) narratives--to which causality is typically attributed--will be of particular interest for this article. The article will also emphasize the ways in which collective memory sites become activated in such belief formation processes. For instance, the memory biases inherent in analogical reasoning often lead people to overestimate the likelihood of future conflict, which may lead them to mobilize in order to defend themselves, and/or to take preemptive action in ways that foment conflict. (shrink)

What is this thing called ‘Commonsense Psychology’? The first matter to settle is what the issue is here. By ‘commonsense psychology,’ I mean primarily the systems of describing, explaining and predicting human thought and action in terms of beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, expectations, intentions and other so-called propositional attitudes. Although commonsense psychology encompasses more than propositional attitudes--e.g., emotions, traits and abilities are also within its purview--belief-desire reasoning forms the core of commonsense psychology. Commonsense psychology is what we use to explain (...) intentional action as ordinarily described--e.g., Jack went to the store because he wanted some ice cream. Commonsense psychology also is used to explain mental states--e.g., Jill feared that she would be late because she thought that the meeting began at 4:00. Commonsense psychology is the province of everyone; we all use it all the time. (shrink)

Most medical research and a substantial amount of non-medical research, especially that involving human participants, is governed by some kind of research ethics committee (REC) following the recommendations of the Declaration of Helsinki for the protection of human participants. The role of RECs is usually seen as twofold: firstly, to make some kind of calculation of the risks and benefits of the proposed research, and secondly, to ensure that participants give informed consent. The extent to which the role of the (...) REC includes the former is not uncontroversial. Indeed, the most prevalent debate on the role of RECs sees liberals and strong paternalists arguing over the importance of informed consent given by competent agents versus the significance of making benevolent decisions on behalf of others. On the one hand, liberals argue for the rights of competent adults to decide for themselves the kinds and extents of risks to which they wish to expose themselves. On the other hand, proponents of strong paternalism raise concerns about the likelihood of participants being able to truly understand the complex data involved in research. They support a role for RECs in which they exercise duties of benevolence towards patients and participants by limiting the extent to which they can be exposed to significant, permanent and irreversible harms. In this paper, we will argue that when it comes to decisions about risk it is neither possible nor desirable for RECs to adopt either role. (shrink)

This review of recent work in the philosophy of science motivated by a commitment to 'naturalism' begins by identifying three key axioms and one theorem shared by philosophers thus self-styled. Owing much to Quine and Ernest Nagel, these philosophers of science share a common agenda with naturalists elsewhere in philosophy. But they have disagreed among themselves about how the axioms and the theorems they share settle long-standing disputes in the philosophy of science. After expounding these disagreements in the work of (...) Boyd, Giere, Laudan, and Kitcher, I argue that naturalism needs to look for more than mere consistency in its foundations. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that, although neglected so far, there is a strong link between generics and testimonial injustice. Testimonial injustice is a form of epistemic injustice that “occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word”. Generics are sentences that express generalizations about a category or about its members without specifying what proportion of the category members possess the predicated property. We argue that generics are especially suited to cause testimonial (...) injustice for three reasons. First, generics elicit an “inferential asymmetry” :1452–1482, 2010). That is, generics are accepted even if only a few individuals possess the predicated property but are, nonetheless, taken to refer to almost all the members of the category. This peculiar combination makes generics particularly apt to cause testimonial injustice. High resistance to counter-evidence is a crucial feature of prejudice, the cause of testimonial injustice, and the more highly predictive a generalization the more it will be employed in concrete situations, leading to instances of testimonial injustice. Second, generics seem to play a key role in leading people to develop essentialist beliefs : 273–301, 2010; Rhodes et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci 109: 13526–13531, 2012). Subjects holding such beliefs treat categories as warranting strong generaliations over their members. Therefore, they will be more likely to rely on prejudice while dealing with the category members. Finally, generics are outstandingly common in everyday speech. Hence, their noxious effects are amplified by their diffusion and should not be underestimated. (shrink)

IntroductionThis title is an important collection of articles on the principles, methods, and facts of human reasoning. It is of interest to argumentation theorists, philosophers, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and researchers in related fields. Out of the 53 articles, 16 were written specifically for this volume by prominent representatives of their fields, and it makes an important contribution to the research on reasoning. The size of the collection enables it to include papers from classic philosophical articles to important new theorizing on (...) the psychology of reasoning, so it can be used as material for a variety of courses with different emphases and levels of expertise. The “comingling” of the empirical and the philosophical keeps the reading experience refreshing for readers of different academic denominations. Both the philosophical and the empirical develop their mutual and distinct debates, though the selection of philosophical texts naturally favors those that link wi .. (shrink)

Using survey data collected from chief executives of nonprofit organizations and financial performance information, the current study examined the influence of the individual chief executive characteristics on their perception of organization performance. The study found that executives with internal Locus of Control, high collectivism values, and analytical decision styles have greater convergence between their perceptions of performance and a financial measure. The study findings also offer support for existing theories that suggest executive cognitions play a significant role in filtering information, (...) ultimately influencing the accuracy of perceptions and the effectiveness of strategic choices. (shrink)

The understanding of decision-making systems has come together in recent years to form a unified theory of decision-making in the mammalian brain as arising from multiple, interacting systems (a planning system, a habit system, and a situation-recognition system). This unified decision-making system has multiple potential access points through which it can be driven to make maladaptive choices, particularly choices that entail seeking of certain drugs or behaviors. We identify 10 key vulnerabilities in the system: (1) moving away from homeostasis, (2) (...) changing allostatic set points, (3) euphorigenic signals, (4) overvaluation in the planning system, (5) incorrect search of situation-action-outcome relationships, (6) misclassification of situations, (7) overvaluation in the habit system, (8) a mismatch in the balance of the two decision systems, (9) over-fast discounting processes, and (10) changed learning rates. These vulnerabilities provide a taxonomy of potential problems with decision-making systems. Although each vulnerability can drive an agent to return to the addictive choice, each vulnerability also implies a characteristic symptomology. Different drugs, different behaviors, and different individuals are likely to access different vulnerabilities. This has implications for an individual's susceptibility to addiction and the transition to addiction, for the potential for relapse, and for the potential for treatment. (shrink)

We perform conceptual acts throughout our daily lives; we are always judging others, guessing their intentions, agreeing or opposing their views and so on. These conceptual acts have phenomenological as well as formal richness. This paper attempts to correct the imbalance between the phenomenal and formal approaches to conceptualization by claiming that we need to shift from the usual dichotomies of cognitive science and epistemology such as the formal/empirical and the rationalist/empiricist divides—to a view of conceptualization grounded in the Indian (...) philosophical notion of “valid cognition”. Methodologically, our paper is an attempt at cross-cultural philosophy and cognitive science; ontologically, it is an attempt at marrying the phenomenal and the formal. (shrink)

Base rates are vital in predicting violent criminal recidivism. However, both lay people given simulated prediction tasks and professionals milking real life predictions appear insensitive to variations in the base rate of violent recidivism. Although there are techniques to help decision makers attend to base rates, increased decision accuracy is better sought in improved actuarial models as opposed to improved clinicians.

Governments and policy-makers have of late displayed renewed attention to behavioural research in an attempt to achieve a range of policy goals, including health promotion. In particular, approaches which could be labelled as ‘nudges’ have gained traction with policy-makers. A range of objections to nudging have been raised in the literature. These include claims that nudges undermine autonomy and liberty, may lead to a decrease in responsibility in decision-making, lack transparency, involve deception, and involve manipulation, potentially occasioning coercion. In this (...) article I focus on claims of coercion, examining nudges within two of the main approaches to coercion—the pressure approach and the more recent enforcement approach. I argue that coercion entails an element of control over the behaviour of agents which is not plausibly displayed by the kinds of serious examples of nudges posited in the literature. (shrink)

The author poses a question: when a person has a thought, what is it that determines what thought he is having? and, equivalently, what is it that determines what thought he is having. looking for an answer he sketches some general aspects of the problems involved in answering these questions, like the mind/body problem, for example. his conclusion is that the posed questions should be set against the background assumption that thoughts are just internal physical occurrences, and that thoughts are (...) categorized in the same way other mental occurrences are categorized. so the author categorizes them in terms of their introspectible characteristics and in terms of "that" clauses. these classifications can be understood as describing thought in terms of their place in the rational architecture. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to investigate the micro and macro predictors of Portuguese willingness to pay (WTP) more taxes to bolster funds channelled to the National Health Service (NHS). An online questionnaire was used to collect data from 584 Portuguese citizens. The statistical analysis was performed through the application of logistic regressions. The research shows that willingness to support increasing taxes depended on socioeconomic, behavioural, and psychological factors. The WTP more taxes to finance the NHS were associated (...) with younger ages, life satisfaction and dispositional optimism, satisfaction with the NHS performance, current perceived risk exposure, and risk orientation. Identifying and understanding the main influencing factors associated with WTP more taxes for NHS is essential to assist policy-makers in developing healthcare reforms. Decision-makers may take this opportunity to improve the NHS since those who ultimately benefit from the measures can provide an additional source of health financing. (shrink)

A series of recent studies have explored the impact of people's judgments regarding physical law, morality, and probability. Surprisingly, such studies indicate that these three apparently unrelated types of judgments often have precisely the same impact. We argue that these findings provide evidence for a more general hypothesis about the kind of cognition people use to think about possibilities. Specifically, we suggest that this aspect of people's cognition is best understood using an idea developed within work in the formal semantics (...) tradition, namely the notion of modality. On the view we propose, people may have separate representations for physical, moral and probabilistic considerations, but they also integrate these various considerations into a unified representation of modality. (shrink)

In 1955, Egon Brunswik presented a paper in which he argued that neglect of the environment and over emphasis of the organism was the major downfall of cognitive psychology. His critiques have largely been ignored and research is discussed that demonstrates the same organismic- asymmetry Brunswik detailed in 1955. This research is discussed in attribution terms since experimental psychologists make behavioral attributions. This organismic-asymmetry has resulted in a body of research that is guilty of the fundamental attribution error. Brunswik's theory (...) of representative design, proposed to address organismic-asymmetry, is discussed and contrasted with calls for ecological validity. Although calls for ecological validity are well intentioned, they lack any systematic theory of the environment and fall significantly short of Brunswik's ideal. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

How should we combine disagreeing expert judgments on the likelihood of an event? A common solution is simple averaging, which allows independent individual errors to cancel out. However, judgments can be correlated due to an overlap in their information, resulting in a miscalibration in the simple average. Optimal weights for weighted averaging are typically unknown and require past data to estimate reliably. This paper proposes an algorithm to aggregate probabilistic judgments under shared information. Experts are asked to report a prediction (...) and a meta-prediction. The latter is an estimate of the average of other individuals’ predictions. In a Bayesian setup, I show that if average prediction is a consistent estimator, the percentage of predictions and meta-predictions that exceed the average prediction should be the same. An “overshoot surprise” occurs when the two measures differ. The Surprising Overshoot algorithm uses the information revealed in an overshoot surprise to correct for miscalibration in the average prediction. Experimental evidence suggests that the algorithm performs well in moderate to large samples and in aggregation problems where individuals disagree in their predictions. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists generally hold that, in light of the empirical data, a subject lacks infallible access to her own mental states. However, while subjects certainly are fallible in some ways, I show that the data fails to discredit that a subject has infallible access to her own occurrent thoughts and judgments. This is argued, first, by revisiting the empirical studies, and carefully scrutinizing what is shown exactly. Second, I argue that if the data were interpreted to rule out all (...) such infallibility, the relevant psychological studies would be self-effacing. For they adopt a methodology where a subject is simply presumed to know her own second-order thoughts and judgments--as if she were infallible about them. After all, what she expresses as her second-order judgment is trusted as accurate without independent evidence — even though such judgments often misrepresent the subject’s first-order states. The upshot is that such studies do not discredit all infallibility hypotheses regarding self-attributions of occurrent states. (shrink)

This paper evaluates attempts to defend established concepts of expertise and clinical judgement against the incursions of evidence‐based practice. Two related arguments are considered. The first suggests that standard accounts of evidence‐based practice imply an overly narrow view of ‘evidence’, and that a more inclusive concept, incorporating ‘patterns of knowing’ not recognised by the familiar evidence hierarchies, should be adopted. The second suggests that statistical generalisations cannot be applied non‐problematically to individual patients in specific contexts, and points out that this (...) is why we need clinical judgement. In evaluating the first argument, I propose a criterion for what counts as evidence. It is a minimalist criterion but the ‘patterns of knowing’, referred to in the literature, still fail to meet it. In evaluating the second argument, I will outline the powerful empirical reasons we have for thinking that decisions based on research evidence are usually better than decisions based on clinical judgement; and show that current efforts to rehabilitate clinical judgement seriously underestimate the strength of these reasons. By way of conclusion, I will sketch the ways in which the concept of expertise will have to be modified if we accept evidence‐based practice as a template for health‐care. (shrink)

Enthymemes are traditionally defined as arguments in which some elements are left unstated. It is an empirical fact that enthymemes are both enormously frequent and appropriately understood in everyday argumentation. Why is it so? We outline an answer that dispenses with the so called "principle of charity", which is the standard notion underlying most works on enthymemes. In contrast, we suggest that a different force drives enthymematic argumentation—namely, parsimony, i.e. the tendency to optimize resource consumption, in light of the agent's (...) goals. On this view, the frequent use of enthymemes does not indicate sub-optimal performance of arguers, requiring appeals to charity for their redemption. On the contrary, it is seen as a highly adaptive argumentation strategy, given the need of everyday reasoners to optimize their cognitive resources. Considerations of parsimony also affect enthymeme reconstruction, i.e. the process by which the interpreter makes sense of the speaker's enthymemes. Far from being driven by any pro-social cooperative instinct, interpretative efforts are aimed at extracting valuable information at reasonable costs from available sources. Thus, there is a tension between parsimony and charity, insofar as the former is a non-social constraint for self-regulation of one's behaviour, whereas the latter implies a pro-social attitude. We will argue that some versions of charity are untenable for enthymeme interpretation, while others are compatible with the view defended here, but still require parsimony to expose the ultimate reasons upon which a presumption of fair treatment in enthymeme reconstruction is founded. (shrink)

When forecasting events, multiple types of uncertainty are often inherently present in the modeling process. Various uncertainty typologies exist, and each type of uncertainty has different implications a scientist might want to convey. In this work, we focus on one type of distinction betweendirect quantitative uncertaintyandindirect qualitative uncertainty. Direct quantitative uncertainty describes uncertainty about facts, numbers, and hypotheses that can be communicated in absolute quantitative forms such as probability distributions or confidence intervals. Indirect qualitative uncertainty describes the quality of knowledge (...) concerning how effectively facts, numbers, or hypotheses represent reality, such as evidence confidence scales proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A large body of research demonstrates that both experts and novices have difficulty reasoning with quantitative uncertainty, and visualizations of uncertainty can help with such traditionally challenging concepts. However, the question of if, and how, people may reason with multiple types of uncertainty associated with a forecast remains largely unexplored. In this series of studies, we seek to understand if individuals can integrate indirect uncertainty about how “good” a model is (operationalized as a qualitative expression of forecaster confidence) with quantified uncertainty in a prediction (operationalized as a quantile dotplot visualization of a predicted distribution). Our first study results suggest that participants utilize both direct quantitative uncertainty and indirect qualitative uncertainty when conveyed as quantile dotplots and forecaster confidence. In manipulations where forecasters were less sure about their prediction, participants made more conservative judgments. In our second study, we varied the amount of quantified uncertainty (in the form of the SD of the visualized distributions) to examine how participants’ decisions changed under different combinations of quantified uncertainty (variance) and qualitative uncertainty (low, medium, and high forecaster confidence). The second study results suggest that participants updated their judgments in the direction predicted by both qualitative confidence information (e.g., becoming more conservative when the forecaster confidence is low) and quantitative uncertainty (e.g., becoming more conservative when the variance is increased). Based on the findings from both experiments, we recommend that forecasters present qualitative expressions of model confidence whenever possible alongside quantified uncertainty. (shrink)

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 (...) the end-point of cognitive development; and contemporary psychology of reasoning has focussed on comparing human reasoning against logical standards. (shrink)

The trend in environmental management toward more adaptive, community-based, and holistic approaches will require new approaches to environmental valuation. In this paper, we offer a new valuation approach, one that embodies the core principles of adaptive management, which is experimental, multi-scalar, and place-based. In addition, we use hierarchy theory to incorporate spatial and temporal variability of natural systems into a multi-scalar management model. Our approach results in the consideration of multiple values within community-based ecosystem management, rather than an attempt to (...) maximise a single variable such as economic efficiency. We then offer two heuristics – one procedural and one evaluative – to guide a community toward shared goals, and to develop indicators to measure progress toward these goals. We illustrate our approach by application to environmental and developmental decisions in the Southern Appalachians. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTreating conditionals as probabilistic statements has been referred to as a defining feature of the “new paradigm” in cognitive psychology. Doing so is attractive for several reasons, but it complicates the problem of assessing the merits of conditional arguments. We consider several variables that relate to judging the persuasiveness of conditional arguments with uncertain premises. We also explore ways of judging the consistency of people's beliefs as represented by components of conditional arguments. Experimental results provide evidence that inconsistencies in beliefs (...) are more prevalent if the arguments’ components are spatially and temporally dispersed than if they are contiguous in space and time. This supports the idea that assuring the consistency among even a small number of beliefs is difficult to do, especially if the beliefs in question are not brought into consciousness at the same time; but consistency can be enhanced when beliefs are considered simultaneously or nea... (shrink)

How can we study bounded rationality? We answer this question by proposing rational task analysis —a systematic approach that prevents experimental researchers from drawing premature conclusions regarding the rationality of agents. RTA is a methodology and perspective that is anchored in the notion of bounded rationality and aids in the unbiased interpretation of results and the design of more conclusive experimental paradigms. RTA focuses on concrete tasks as the primary interface between agents and environments and requires explicating essential task elements, (...) specifying rational norms, and bracketing the range of possible performance, before contrasting various benchmarks with actual performance. After describing RTA’s core components we illustrate its use in three case studies that examine human memory updating, multitasking behavior, and melioration. We discuss RTA’s characteristic elements and limitations by comparing it to related approaches. We conclude that RTA provides a useful tool to render the study of bounded rationality more transparent and less prone to theoretical confusion. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to describe the mechanism of the public perception of risk of artificial intelligence. For that we apply the social amplification of risk framework to the public perception of artificial intelligence using data collected from Twitter from 2007 to 2018. We analyzed when and how there appeared a significant representation of the association between risk and artificial intelligence in the public awareness of artificial intelligence. A significant finding is that the image of the risk of (...) AI is mostly associated with existential risks that became popular after the fourth quarter of 2014. The source of that was the public positioning of experts who happen to be the real movers of the risk perception of AI so far instead of actual disasters. We analyze here how this kind of risk was amplified, its secondary effects, what are the varieties of risk unrelated to existential risk, and what is the dynamics of the experts in addressing their concerns to the audience of lay people. (shrink)

The psychological mechanism of decision-making has traditionally been modeled with the help of belief-desire psychology: the agent has some desires (or other pro-attitudes) and some background beliefs and deciding between two possible actions is a matter of comparing the probability of the satisfaction of these desires given the background beliefs in the case of the performance of each action. There is a wealth of recent empirical findings about how we actually make decisions that seems to be in conflict with this (...) picture. My aim is to outline an alternative model that is consistent with these empirical findings. This alternative model emphasizes the role imagination plays in our decisions: when we decide between two possible actions, we imagine ourselves in the situation that we imagine to be the outcome of these two actions and then compare these two imaginings. (shrink)