Previous research suggests that children can infer causal relations from patterns of events. However, what appear to be cases of causal inference may simply reduce to children recognizing relevant associations among events, and responding based on those associations. To examine this claim, in Experiments 1 and 2, children were introduced to a “blicket detector,” a machine that lit up and played music when certain objects were placed upon it. Children observed patterns of contingency between objects and the machine's activation that (...) required them to use indirect evidence to make causal inferences. Critically, associative models either made no predictions, or made incorrect predictions about these inferences. In general, children were able to make these inferences, but some developmental differences between 3- and 4-year-olds were found. We suggest that children's causal inferences are not based on recognizing associations, but rather that children develop a mechanism for Bayesian structure learning. Experiment 3 explicitly tests a prediction of this account. Children were asked to make an inference about ambiguous data based on the base rate of certain events occurring. Four-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds were able to make this inference. (shrink)

In response to the increasingly acknowledged power of metaphor upon everyday and scientific thinking, the present essay aims to revitalize the metaphoric process in commonsense psychology from the interaction view perspective. As prerequisites, a historical review of the "man-the-scientist" metaphor inherited in commonsense psychology, and a situation analysis of its dormant state are attempted. With metaphorical imagination, a holistic-paradigmatic view of personal theories is postulated on the basis of new knowledge in the philosophy and history of science, namely, the Duhem (...) - Quine (holism) thesis and Kuhn's paradigmatic perspective of scientific activities. To optimize the metaphoric process, deliberations are made on the similarities as well as the differences between the principal subject (i.e. everyday activities) and the subsidiary subject (i.e. scientific activities). It is shown that the "man-the-scientist" metaphoric process can be far-reaching and dialectic in nature, resulting in fresh perspectives for understanding both everyday and scientific activities. The focus of the present essay lies in elaborating a more sophisticated view on personal theories, and in calling for a non-reductionist approach to the investigation of commonsense psychology. (shrink)

Recent experimental philosophy arguments have raised trouble for philosophers' reliance on armchair intuitions. One popular line of response has been the expertise defense: philosophers are highly-trained experts, whereas the subjects in the experimental philosophy studies have generally been ordinary undergraduates, and so there's no reason to think philosophers will make the same mistakes. But this deploys a substantive empirical claim, that philosophers' training indeed inculcates sufficient protection from such mistakes. We canvass the psychological literature on expertise, which indicates that people (...) are not generally very good at reckoning who will develop expertise under what circumstances. We consider three promising hypotheses concerning what philosophical expertise might consist in: (i) better conceptual schemata; (ii) mastery of entrenched theories; and (iii) general practical know-how with the entertaining of hypotheticals. On inspection, none seem to provide us with good reason to endorse this key empirical premise of the expertise defense. (shrink)

This article presents the results of an experiment which investigated elementary school children's explanations of the day/night cycle. First, third, and fifth grade children were asked to explain certain phenomena, such as the disappearance of the sun during the night, the disappearance of stars during the day, the apparent movement of the moon, and the alteration of day and night. The results showed that the majority of the children in our sample used in a consistent fashion a small number of (...) relatively well‐defined mental models of the earth, the sun, and the moon to explain the day/night cycle. These mental models of the day/night cycle were empirically accurate, logically consistent and revealed some sensitivity on the part of the children to issues of simplicity of explanation. The younger children formed Initial mental models which provided explanations of the day/night cycle based on everyday experience (e.g., the sun goes down behind mountains, clouds cover up the sun). The older children constructed synthetic mental models (e.g., the sun and the moon revolve around the stationary earth every 24 hours; the earth rotates in an up/down direction and the sun and moon are fixed on opposite sides) which represented attempts to synthesize the culturally accepted view with aspects of their Initial models. A few of the older children appeared to have constructed a mental model of the day/night cycle similar to the scientific one. A theoretical framework is outlined which explains the formation of initial, synthetic, and scientific models of the day/night cycle in terms of the reinterpretation of a hierarchy of constraints, some of which are present early in the child's life, and others which emerge later out of the structure of the acquired knowledge. (shrink)

Many political theorists, philosophers, social scientists, and other academics engage in political activism. And many think this is how things ought to be. In this essay, I challenge the ideal of the politically engaged academic. I argue that, quite to the contrary, political theorists, philosophers, and other political thinkers have a prima facie duty to refrain from political activism. This argument is based on a commonsense moral principle, a claim about the point of political thought, and findings in cognitive psychology.

In this paper, I use Jonathan Haidt’s theory to explore an affective disposition that I call “indolent sympathy”. I argue that this disposition prevents a considerable group of human beings from showing solidarity with the millions of people who find themselves in conditions of poverty or extreme poverty. To demonstrate this, I will first present two dissimilar cases that show the type of affective disposition that I wish to submit to the reader’s consideration. Secondly, I will discuss the main characteristics (...) of this affective disposition. Thirdly, I will discuss the social intuitionist model, highlighting the aspects that will help me to account for indolent sympathy. Finally, I will read indolent sympathy in the light of Haidt’s theory and explain one of its most important features: brutality. (shrink)

Mathematics educators suggest that students of all ages need to participate in productive forms of mathematical argument (NCTM, 2000). Accordingly, we developed two complementary frameworks for analyzing the emergence of mathematical argumentation in one second‐grade classroom. Children attempted to resolve contesting claims about the “space covered” by three different‐looking rectangles of equal area measure. Our first analysis renders the topology of the semantic structure of the classroom conversation as a directed graph. The graph affords clear “at a glance” visualization of (...) how various senses of mathematics—as imagined, as performed, and as historically rooted—were interrelated. The graph represents the emergence and intercoordination between conceptual and procedural knowledge in the ebb and flow of classroom conversation. The graph has not just descriptive, but also predictive power: Interconnectedness among the nodes of the graph representing the first 40 min of conversation predicted the structure of recall in the final ten minutes by children who had played little overt role in the conversation up to that point. The second, complementary framework draws upon Goffman's expanded repertoire of roles in speech to demonstrate how the teacher orchestrated this classroom conversation to establish coherent argument. In this second analysis, we establish how the teacher mediated between the everyday talk of her students and the discourse of mathematics. Her revoicing of student talk created interstices for identity and participation in the formation of the argument. Together, the two forms of analysis illuminate the emergence of mathematical argument at two levels: as collective structure and concurrently, as individual activity. (shrink)

Data are presented that focus on the nature and development of argumentative reasoning. In particular our study describes how support for or against an issue affects memory for critical parts of an argumentative interaction, judgments of argument goodness, and the content of the reasons given in support of one view versus another. Two other factors were examined: developmental differences in argumentation skill and the conditional nature of supporting one side of an argument across varying contexts. Our results show that even (...) seven year old children can recognize, identify, and use the basic components of an argument to provide evidence for and make judgements about their favored position. Moreover, if position support is held constant across all age groups of students, seven year old children were found to give reasons and explanations that were highly similar in content and principle to college students. The same similarities held across age with respect to biases in memory and judgements of argument goodness. The primary difference between children's and college students' argument behavior lay in the side of an argument the students chose to support. Seven year old children and some eleven yearold children supported positions that impute more value to friendship and social consequences than to the maintenance and advancement of individual rights, as specified in a contract agreement. The similarities and differences across development are discussed with respect to a theory of argumentation that speaks to the importance of understanding the nature of goal conflict and a theory of intentionality in predicting how arguments will be represented and resolved. (shrink)

A productive way to think about imagistic mental models of physical systems is as though they were sources of quasi‐empirical evidence. People depict or imagine events at those points in time when they would experiment with the world if possible. Moreover, just as they would do when observing the world, people induce patterns of behavior from the results depicted in their imaginations. These resulting patterns of behavior can then be cast into symbolic rules to simplify thinking about future problems and (...) to reveal higher order relationships. Using simple gear problems, three experiments explored the occasions of use for, and the inductive transitions between, depictive models and number‐based rules. The first two experiments used the convergent evidence of problem‐solving latencies, hand motions, referential language and error data to document the initial use of a model, the induction of rules from the modeling results, and the fallback to a model when a rule fails. The third experiment explored the intermediate representations that facilitate the induction of rules from depictive models. The strengths and weaknesses of depictive modeling and more analytic systems of reasoning are delineated to motivate the reasons for these transitions. (shrink)

Prior research has identified age 9–11 as a critical period for the development of the control-of-variables strategy (CVS). We examine the stability of interindividual differences in children's CVS skills with regard to their precursor skills during this critical developmental period. To this end, we relate two precursor skills of CVS at age 9 to four skills constituting fully developed CVS more than 2 years later, controlling for children's more general cognitive development. Note thatN= 170 second- to fourth-graders worked on multiple (...) choice-assessments of their understanding of indeterminacy of evidence and of confounding. We find relations between these two precursor skills and children's CVS skills 2 years later at age 11 inplanning, identifying, andinterpretingcontrolled experiments, and in recognizing the inconclusiveness of confounded comparisons (understanding). In accordance with the perspective that both indeterminacy and confounding constitute critical, related yet distinct elements of CVS, both precursor skills contribute to the prediction of later CVS. Together, the two precursor skills can explain 39% of students' later CVS mastery. Overall, the understanding of indeterminacy is a stronger predictor of fully developed CVS than that of confounding. The understanding of confounding, however, is a better predictor of the more difficult CVS sub-skills of understanding the inconclusiveness of confounded comparisons, and of planning a correctly controlled experiment. Importantly, both precursor skills maintain interactive predictive strength when controlling for children's general cognitive abilities and reading comprehension, showing that the developmental dynamics of CVS and its precursor skills cannot be fully ascribed to general cognitive development. We discuss implications of these findings for theories about the development of CVS and broader scientific reasoning. (shrink)

The history of ethics often presupposes rationalist thinking on moral issues. An alternative to rationalism has been proposed by the social intuitionist model. This model suggests the bulk of our moral decisions are ‘gut reactions’ or intuitions. Unlike the rationalists, which support reasons and deliberation to draw moral conclusions, intuitionists argue such reasoning is used to support preconceived ethical decisions. This paper provides the first investigation to determine if intuitionism has any validity within business ethics. Using data from the Defining (...) Issues Test and individual journal entries, results indicate discussion-based pedagogy improved the moral reasoning of participants but had very little influence over their beliefs. In short, the social intuitionist model is supported by this study. Most importantly, ethics education that focuses on peer-to-peer discussion can change how students’ reason about moral problems and should be heavily incorporated into classrooms. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a framework where possible relations between learning and mental models are explored. In particular, I’ll be concerned with non-symbolic gestures accompanying discourse and their role in inducing the construction of models and therefore deep comprehension and learning in the listener. Also, I’ll be concerned with cognitive and socio-cognitive conflicts and their roles in inducing construction of alternative models of a problem and therefore in learning to reason. Human ability to learn is of great importance for (...) individuals interested in change. Indeed, to learn both declarative and procedural knowledge means to change, and in order to be able to intervene on change in a desired way it is necessary to have a theory of the mental representations and processes involved in learning and a theory of the communication and contexts that favour learning. (shrink)

A familiar adage in the philosophy of science is that general hypotheses are better supported by varied evidence than by uniform evidence. Several studies suggest that young children do not respect this principle, and thus suffer from a defect in their inductive methodology. We argue that the diversity principle does not have the normative status that psychologists attribute to it, and should be replaced by a simple rule of probability. We then report experiments designed to detect conformity to the latter (...) rule in children's inductive judgment. The results suggest that young children in both the United States and Taiwan are sensitive to the constraints imposed by the rule on judgments of probability and evidential strength. We conclude with a suggested reinterpretation of the thesis that children's inductive methodology qualifies them as “little scientists.”. (shrink)

Many cognitive and evolutionary theories of religion argue that supernatural explanations are byproducts of our cognitive adaptations. An influential argument states that our supernatural explanations result from a tendency to generate anthropomorphic explanations, and that this tendency is a byproduct of an error management strategy because agents tend to be associated with especially high fitness costs. We propose instead that anthropomorphic and other supernatural explanations result as features of a broader toolkit of well-designed cognitive adaptations, which are designed for explaining (...) the abstract and causal structure of complex, unobservable, and uncertain phenomena that have substantial impacts on fitness. Specifically, we argue that (1) mental representations about the abstract vs. the supernatural are largely overlapping, if not identical, and (2) when the data-generating processes for scarce and ambiguous observations are complex and opaque, a naive observer can improve a bias-variance trade-off by starting with a simple, underspecified explanation that Western observers readily interpret as “supernatural.” We then argue that (3) in many cases, knowledge specialists across cultures offer pragmatic services that involve apparently supernatural explanations, and their clients are frequently willing to pay them in a market for useful and effective services. We propose that at least some ethnographic descriptions of religion might actually reflect ordinary and adaptive responses to novel problems such as illnesses and natural disasters, where knowledge specialists possess and apply the best available explanations about phenomena that would otherwise be completely mysterious and unpredictable. (shrink)

We argue in favour of the general proposition that the nature of reasoning is best understood within a context of its origins and development. A major dimension of what develops in the years from childhood to adulthood, we propose, is increasing meta-level monitoring and management of cognition. Two domains are examined in presenting support for these claims—multivariable causal reasoning and argumentive reasoning.

The concept of innateness appears in systematic research within cognitive science, but it also appears in less systematic modes of thought that long predate the scientific study of the mind. The present studies therefore explore the relationship between the properly scientific uses of this concept and its role in ordinary folk understanding. Studies 1-4 examined the judgments of people with no specific training in cognitive science. Results showed (a) that judgments about whether a trait was innate were not affected by (...) whether or not the trait was learned, but (b) such judgments were impacted by moral considerations. Study 5 looked at the judgments of both non-scientists and scientists, in conditions that encouraged either thinking about individual cases or thinking about certain general principles. In the case-based condition, both non-scientists and scientists showed an impact of moral considerations but little impact of learning. In the principled condition, both non-scientists and scientists showed an impact of learning but little impact of moral considerations. These results suggest that both non-scientists and scientists are drawn to a conception of innateness that differs from the one at work in contemporary scientific research but that they are also both capable of 'filtering out' their initial intuitions and using a more scientific approach. (shrink)

A novel experimental paradigm that measured theory change and confidence in participants' theories was used in three experiments to test the effects of anomalous evidence. Experiment 1 varied the amount of anomalous evidence to see if “dose size” made incremental changes in confidence toward theory change. Experiment 2 varied whether anomalous evidence was convergent or replicating. Experiment 3 varied whether participants were provided with an alternative theory that explained the anomalous evidence. All experiments showed that participants' confidence changes were commensurate (...) with the amount of anomalous evidence presented, and that larger decreases in confidence predicted theory changes. Convergent evidence and the presentation of an alternative theory led to larger confidence change. Convergent evidence also caused more theory changes. Even when people do not change theories, factors pertinent to the evidence and alternative theories decrease their confidence in their current theory and move them incrementally closer to theory change. (shrink)

Research on moral judgment has been dominated by rationalist models, in which moral judgment is thought to be caused by moral reasoning. The author gives 4 reasons for considering the hypothesis that moral reasoning does not cause moral judgment; rather, moral reasoning is usually a post hoc construction, generated after a judgment has been reached. The social intuitionist model is presented as an alternative to rationalist models. The model is a social model in that it deemphasizes the private reasoning done (...) by individuals and emphasizes instead the importance of social and cultural influences. The model is an intuitionist model in that it states that moral judgment is generally the result of quick, automatic evaluations (intuitions). The model is more consistent than rationalist models with recent findings in social, cultural, evolutionary, and biological psychology, as well as in anthropology and primatology. (shrink)

(2013). Rational argument, rational inference. Argument & Computation: Vol. 4, Formal Models of Reasoning in Cognitive Psychology, pp. 21-35. doi: 10.1080/19462166.2012.689327.

People are adept at inferring novel causal relations, even from only a few observations. Prior knowledge about the probability of encountering causal relations of various types and the nature of the mechanisms relating causes and effects plays a crucial role in these inferences. We test a formal account of how this knowledge can be used and acquired, based on analyzing causal induction as Bayesian inference. Five studies explored the predictions of this account with adults and 4-year-olds, using tasks in which (...) participants learned about the causal properties of a set of objects. The studies varied the two factors that our Bayesian approach predicted should be relevant to causal induction: the prior probability with which causal relations exist, and the assumption of a deterministic or a probabilistic relation between cause and effect. Adults’ judgments (Experiments 1, 2, and 4) were in close correspondence with the quantitative predictions of the model, and children’s judgments (Experiments 3 and 5) agreed qualitatively with this account. (shrink)

Cognitive studies of science and technology have had a long history of largely independent research projects that have appeared in multiple outlets, but rarely together. The emergence of a new International Society for Psychology of Science and Technology suggests that this is a good time to put some of the latest work in this area into topiCS in a way that will both acquaint readers with the cutting edge in this domain and also give them a hint of its history. (...) One core theme includes how scientists, inventors, and engineers represent and solve problems; another, related theme is the extent to which they distribute and share cognition. Methodologies include fine‐grained studies of historical records, protocols of working scientists, observations and comparisons of engineering science laboratories, and computational simulations designed both to serve as research tools and also to improve scientific problem‐solving. The series of articles will conclude with the Associate Editor’s suggestions for future research. (shrink)