This paper reports on the Kuhnian revolution now occurring in neuropsychology that is finally supportive of and friendly to phenomenology — the "enactive" approach to the mind-body relation, grounded in the notion of self-organization, which is consistent with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on virtually every point. According to the enactive approach, human minds understand the world by virtue of the ways our bodies can act relative to it, or the ways we can imagine acting. This requires that action be distinguished from (...) passivity, that the mental be approached from a first person perspective, and that the cognitive capacities of the brain be grounded in the emotional and motivational processes that guide action and anticipate action affordances. It avoids the old intractable problems inherent in the computationalist approaches of twentieth century atomism and radical empiricism, and again allows phenomenology to bridge to neuropsychology in the way Merleau-Ponty was already doing over half a century ago. (shrink)

When we evaluate moral agents, we consider many factors, including whether the agent acted freely, or under duress or coercion. In turn, moral evaluations have been shown to influence our (non-moral) evaluations of these same factors. For example, when we judge an agent to have acted immorally, we are subsequently more likely to judge the agent to have acted freely, not under force. Here, we investigate the cognitive signatures of this effect in interpersonal situations, in which one agent (“forcer”) forces (...) another agent (“forcee”) to act either immorally or morally. The structure of this relationship allowed us to ask questions about both the “forcer” and the “forcee.” Paradoxically, participants judged that the “forcer” forced the “forcee” to act immorally (i.e. X forced Y), but that the “forcee” was not forced to act immorally (i.e. Y was not forced by X). This pattern obtained only for human agents who acted intentionally. Directly changing participants’ focus from one agent to another (forcer vs. forcee) also changed the target of moral evaluation and therefore force attributions. The full pattern of judgments may provide a window into motivated moral reasoning and focusing bias more generally; participants may have been motivated to attribute greater force to the immoral forcer and greater freedom to the immoral forcee. (shrink)

The Monty Hall Dilemma (MHD) is a two-step decision problem involving counterintuitive conditional probabilities. The first choice is made among three equally probable options, whereas the second choice takes place after the elimination of one of the non-selected options which does not hide the prize. Differing from most Bayesian problems, statistical information in the MHD has to be inferred, either by learning outcome probabilities or by reasoning from the presented sequence of events. This often leads to suboptimal decisions and erroneous (...) probability judgments. Specifically, decision makers commonly develop a wrong intuition that final probabilities are equally distributed, together with a preference for their first choice. Several studies have shown that repeated practice enhances sensitivity to the different reward probabilities, but does not facilitate correct Bayesian reasoning. However, modest improvements in probability judgments have been observed after guided explanations. To explain these dissociations, the present review focuses on two types of causes producing the observed biases: Emotional-based choice biases and cognitive limitations in understanding probabilistic information. Among the latter, we identify a crucial cause for the universal difficulty in overcoming the equiprobability illusion: Incomplete representation of prior and conditional probabilities. We conclude that repeated practice and/or high incentives can be effective for overcoming choice biases, but promoting an adequate partitioning of possibilities seems to be necessary for overcoming cognitive illusions and improving Bayesian reasoning. (shrink)

Two experiments investigated the factors that people consider when evaluating informal arguments in newspaper and magazine editorials. Experiment 1 showed that subjects were more likely to object to the truth of the premises and the conclusions of an argument than to the strength of the link between them. Experiment 1 also revealed two manipulations that helped subjects object to the link between premises and conclusions: rating how well the premises support the conclusions and rating the believability of the premises and (...) conclusions. Experiment 2 further demonstrated that subjects who identified the premises and conclusions of an argument were better at formulating objections to the link between premises and conclusions. Moreover, subjects in Experiment 2 were better and faster at formulating objections to the truth of the premises and conclusions than to the link between premises and conclusions. The results are discussed in terms of the constraints they pose for developing a cognitive theory of informal reasoning. (shrink)

Hempel's paradox of the ravens has to do with the question of what constitutes confirmation from a logical point of view; Wason 's selection task has been used extensively to investigate how people go about attempting to confirm or disconfirm conditional claims. This paper presents an argument that the paradox is resolved, and that people's typical performance in the selection task can be explained, by consideration of what constitutes an effective strategy for seeking evidence of the tenability of universal or (...) conditional claims in everyday life. (shrink)

Abstract How do people find arguments while engaged in a discussion? Following an analogy with visual search, a mechanism that performs this task is described. It is a metarepresentational device that examines representations in a mostly serial manner until it finds a good enough argument supporting one’s position. It is argued that the mechanism described in dual process theories as ‘system 2’, or analytic reasoning fulfills these requirements. This provides support for the hypothesis that reasoning serves an argumentative function. Content (...) Type Journal Article Pages 1-20 DOI 10.1007/s10503-011-9256-1 Authors Hugo Mercier, Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program, University of Pennsylvania, 313 Cohen Hall, 249 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA Journal Argumentation Online ISSN 1572-8374 Print ISSN 0920-427X. (shrink)

The Condorcet Jury Theorem, along with empirical results, establishes the accuracy of majority voting in a broad range of conditions. Here we investigate whether naïve participants (in the U.S. and...

How do people make deductions? The orthodox view in psychology is that they use formal rules of inference like those of a “natural deduction” system.Deductionargues that their logical competence depends, not on formal rules, but on mental models. They construct models of the situation described by the premises, using their linguistic knowledge and their general knowledge. They try to formulate a conclusion based on these models that maintains semantic information, that expresses it parsimoniously, and that makes explicit something not directly (...) stated by any premise. They then test the validity of the conclusion by searching for alternative models that might refute the conclusion. The theory also resolves long-standing puzzles about reasoning, including how nonmonotonic reasoning occurs in daily life. The book reports experiments on all the main domains of deduction, including inferences based on prepositional connectives such as “if” and “or,” inferences based on relations such as “in the same place as,” inferences based on quantifiers such as “none,” “any,” and “only,” and metalogical inferences based on assertions about the true and the false. Where the two theories make opposite predictions, the results confirm the model theory and run counter to the formal rule theories. Without exception, all of the experiments corroborate the two main predictions of the model theory: inferences requiring only one model are easier than those requiring multiple models, and erroneous conclusions are usually the result of constructing only one of the possible models of the premises. (shrink)

Mental models theorists have proposed that reasoners tend to focus on what is explicit in their mental models, and that certain debiasing procedures can induce them to direct their attention to other relevant information. For instance, Green and Larking 1995; also Green, 1995a facilitated performance on the Wason selection task by inducing participants to consider counterexamples to the conditional rule. However, these authors acknowledged that one aspect of their data might require some modification to the mental models theory. This research (...) is discussed here, and it is suggested that the results may be better accommodated by mental inference rules theory than by mental models theory. (shrink)

Two experiments using a realistic version of the selection task examined the relationship between participants' probability estimates of finding a counter example and their selections. Experiment 1 used everyday categories in the context of a scenario to determine whether or not the number of instances in a category affected the estimated probability of a counter-example. Experiment 2 modified the scenario in order to alter participants' estimates of finding a specific counter-example. Unlike Kirby 1994a, but consistent with his proposals, both studies (...) showed that probability estimates significantly predicted selection. Overall results point to the value of understanding selections in terms of their subjective expected utility. (shrink)

This paper outlines a theory and computer implementation of causal meanings and reasoning. The meanings depend on possibilities, and there are four weak causal relations: A causes B, A prevents B, A allows B, and A allows not‐B, and two stronger relations of cause and prevention. Thus, A causes B corresponds to three possibilities: A and B, not‐A and B, and not‐A and not‐B, with the temporal constraint that B does not precede A; and the stronger relation conveys only the (...) first and last of these possibilities. Individuals represent these relations in mental models of what is true in the various possibilities. The theory predicts a number of phenomena, and, contrary to many accounts, it implies that the meaning of causation is not probabilistic, differs from the meaning of enabling conditions, and does not depend on causal powers or mechanisms. The theory also implies that causal deductions do not depend on schemas or rules. (shrink)