People cannot contemplate a proposition without believing that proposition. A model of belief fixation is sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant, and somewhat mysterious psychological phenomena and philosophical paradoxes. Toward this end I also contend that our intuitive understanding of the workings of introspection is mistaken. In particular, I argue that propositional attitudes are beyond the grasp of our introspective capacities. We learn about our beliefs from observing our behavior, not from introspecting our stock beliefs. -/- The model (...) of belief fixation offered in the dissertation poses a novel dilemma for theories of rationality. One might have thought that the ability to contemplate ideas while withholding assent is a necessary condition on rationality. In short, it seems that rational creatures shouldn‘t just form their beliefs based on whatever they happen to think. However, it seems that we are creatures that automatically and reflexively form our beliefs based on whatever propositions we happen to consider. Thus, either the rational requirement that states that we must have evidence for our beliefs must be jettisoned or we must accept the conclusion that we are necessarily irrational. (shrink)

La filosofía de la ciencia se desarrolló durante la primera mitad del siglo xx bajo el supuesto de que la ciencia podía caracterizarse por la estructura lógica tanto del conocimiento articulado en las teorías más exitosas como de sus explicaciones. En la segunda mitad del siglo xx se cuestiona fuertemente esa idea, pero se sigue asumiendo que la filosofía de la ciencia debe hacerse siguiendo los cánones de una epistemología fundamentalista que considera que el avance de la ciencia pasa por (...) una ontología cada vez mas austera guiada por la idea de "mientras menos mejor". Desde esta perspectiva fundamentalista, el que las diferentes ciencias hablen de diferentes tipos de cosas es un obstáculo al entendimiento, producto de la imperfección del conocimiento actual. Este ideal nos invita a pensar que la epistemología debe hacerse reflexionando sobre el conocimiento articulado en nuestras teorías más austeras y nos compromete con propuestas reduccionistas problemáticas que no permiten explicar la diversidad de recursos epistémicos que de hecho utilizan los científicos. En este libro promovemos una epistemología que no sigue el lema de "mientras menos mejor", sino el de "organizar nuestros recursos epistémicos de manera que se genere entendimiento". Así, la misma estructura de las explicaciones y las prácticas (que incluye métodos y normas respecto de lo que se considera plausible y valioso) es lo que nos da la pauta para responder a la pregunta de qué es lo que hay. Esta estrategia epistémica nos obliga a hacer una filosofía de la ciencia muy cercana a la ciencia, reconociendo la pluralidad de sus métodos, objetivos y prácticas, sin reducir la filosofía de la ciencia a la sociología o a cualquier otra ciencia en particular. (shrink)

Crispin Wright maintains that the architecture of perceptual justification is such that we can acquire justification for our perceptual beliefs only if we have antecedent justification for ruling out any sceptical alternative. Wright contends that this principle doesn’t elicit scepticism, for we are non-evidentially entitled to accept the negation of any sceptical alternative. Sebastiano Moruzzi has challenged Wright’s contention by arguing that since our non-evidential entitlements don’t remove the epistemic risk of our perceptual beliefs, they don’t actually enable us to (...) acquire justification for these beliefs. In this paper I show that Wright’s responses to Moruzzi are ineffective and that Moruzzi’s argument is validated by probabilistic reasoning. I also suggest that Wright cannot answer Moruzzi’s challenge without weakening the support available for his conception of the architecture of perceptual justification. (shrink)

The concept of 'levels of organization' has come under fire recently as being useless for scientific and philosophical purposes. In this paper, we show that 'levels' is actually a remarkably resilient and constructive conceptual tool that can be, and in fact is, used for a variety of purposes. To this effect, we articulate an account of the importance of the levels concept seen in light of its status as a major organizing concept of biology. We argue that the usefulness of (...) ‘levels’ is best seen in the heuristic contributions the concept makes to treating and structuring scientific problems. We illustrate this with two examples from biological research. (shrink)

There is a vast literature that seeks to uncover features underlying moral judgment by eliciting reactions to hypothetical scenarios such as trolley problems. These thought experiments assume that participants accept the outcomes stipulated in the scenarios. Across seven studies, we demonstrate that intuition overrides stipulated outcomes even when participants are explicitly told that an action will result in a particular outcome. Participants instead substitute their own estimates of the probability of outcomes for stipulated outcomes, and these probability estimates in turn (...) influence moral judgments. Our findings demonstrate that intuitive likelihoods are one critical factor in moral judgment, one that is not suspended even in moral dilemmas that explicitly stipulate outcomes. Features thought to underlie moral reasoning, such as intention, may operate, in part, by affecting the intuitive likelihood of outcomes, and, problematically, moral differences between scenarios may be confounded with non-moral intuitive probabilities. (shrink)

The so-called phenomenon of collective intelligence is now a burgeoning movement, with several guises and examples in many areas. We briefly survey some relevant aspects of collective intelligence in several formats, such as social software, crowdfunding and convergence, and show that a formal version of this paradigm can also be posed to logic systems, by employing the notion of logic societies. The paradigm of logical societies has lead to a new notion of distributed semantics, the society semantics, with theoretical advances (...) in defining new forms of n-valued semantics in terms of k-valued semantics, for, and applications to flying security protocols. We summarise the main advances of society semantics, commenting on their general case, the possible-translations semantics and pointing to some conceptual points and some problems and directions still to be explored. (shrink)

The paper deals with the relation between abduction and inference to the best explanation. A heuristic and a normative interpretation of IBE are distinguished. Besides, two different normative interpretations —those vindicated by I. Niiniluoto and S. Psillos— are discussed. I conclude that, in principle, Aliseda’s theory of abduction fits better with a heuristic account of IBE.

Since the 1970’s there has been a major increase in adventure sports participation but it seems that engagement in such sports comes with a stigma: adventure sports participants are often regarded as reckless ‘daredevils’. We approach the questions about people’s perception of risk and recklessness in adventure sports by combining empirical research with philosophical analysis. First, we provide empirical evidence that suggests that laypeople tend to assess the danger of adventure sports as greater than more mundane sports and judge adventure (...) sports participants as more reckless than participants in non-adventure sports. We contextualise these findings within existing psychological risk perception paradigms and outline new philosophical explanations of the identified pattern in laypeople’s risk perception. (shrink)

We argue that the claim that essence-based causal explanations emerge, hydra-like, from an inherence heuristic is incomplete. No plausible mechanism for the transition from concrete properties, or cues, to essences is provided. Moreover, the fundamental shotgun and storytelling mechanisms of the inherence heuristic are not clearly enough specified to distinguish them, developmentally, from associative or causal networks.

In this chapter it is demonstrated that the way in which leaders implement a decision largely depends on the nature of it, that is, whether it is strategic or not. Leaders must be as open as possible and not withhold information from the persons involved in the process. Therefore, they should distribute as much relevant information as possible to meeting participants before a meeting. At the same time, they must be able to steer the process. It is not unusual for (...) there to be a separation between the formulation and implementation of a strategic decision. Often, it is the top leadership that formulates the decision problem and the middle managers that implement its solution. For this reason, it is relatively common that the top leadership signals that the implementation has been successful as soon as the middle managers begin to report positive results. This can sometimes happen even though most of the implementation is incomplete. However, there are also cases where the top leaders rule out certain implementation processes as failures when in fact they prove later on to be successful. A common problem in organizations is that leaders often inherit the task of implementing decisions that past leaders have made. In order to succeed with an implementation, leaders must understand the importance of the process. They must communicate their vision clearly, evaluate and monitor continuously, and allow interested parties to participate actively in the process. They should also understand that what at first may look like a failure, at a later stage may prove to be a success -/- . (shrink)

Heuristics are often invoked in the philosophical, psychological, and cognitive science literatures to describe or explain methodological techniques or "shortcut" mental operations that help in inference, decision-making, and problem-solving. Yet there has been surprisingly little philosophical work done on the nature of heuristics and heuristic reasoning, and a close inspection of the way(s) in which "heuristic" is used throughout the literature reveals a vagueness and uncertainty with respect to what heuristics are and their role in cognition. This dissertation seeks to (...) remedy this situation by motivating philosophical inquiry into heuristics and heuristic reasoning, and then advancing a theory of how heuristics operate in cognition. I develop a positive working characterization of heuristics that is coherent and robust enough to account for a broad range of phenomena in reasoning and inference, and makes sense of empirical data in a systematic way. I then illustrate the work this characterization does by considering the sorts of problems that many philosophers believe heuristics solve, namely those resulting from the so-called frame problem. Considering the frame problem motivates the need to gain a better understanding of how heuristics work and the cognitive structures over which they operate. I develop a general theory of cognition which I argue underwrites the heuristic operations that concern this dissertation. I argue that heuristics operate over highly organized systems of knowledge, and I offer a cognitive architecture to accommodate this view. I then provide an account of the systems of knowledge that heuristics are supposed to operate over, in which I suggest that such systems of knowledge are concepts. The upshot, then, is that heuristics operate over concepts. I argue, however, that heuristics do not operate over conceptual content, but over metainformational relations between activated and primed concepts and their contents. Finally, to show that my thesis is empirically adequate, I consider empirical evidence on heuristic reasoning and argue that my account of heuristics explains the data. (shrink)

After describing the disorder of psychopathy, I examine the theories and the evidence concerning the psychopaths’ deficient moral capacities. I first examine whether or not psychopaths can pass tests of moral knowledge. Most of the evidence suggests that they can. If there is a lack of moral understanding, then it has to be due to an incapacity that affects not their declarative knowledge of moral norms, but their deeper understanding of them. I then examine two suggestions: it is their deficient (...) practical reason or their stunted emotions that are at fault. The evidence supports both explanations. I conclude with an overview of the debate concerning whether they are morally or legally responsible for their actions. (shrink)

This paper proposes and defends the multifactorial view of stereotyping. According to this view, multiple factors determine whether or not any act of stereotyping increases the chance of an accurate judgment being made about an individual to whom the stereotype is applied. To support this conclusion, various features of acts of stereotyping that can determine the accuracy of stereotyping judgments are identified. The argument challenges two existing views that suggest that it is relatively easy for an act of stereotyping to (...) increase the chance of an accurate judgment being made. In the process, it shows why stereotyping that associates black people more strongly than white people with criminality in the United States cannot be defended, and actions to reduce the stereotyping criticized, on the basis that engaging in this form of stereotyping increases the chance of accurate judgments. As each of these important conclusions is supported by results from empirical psychology, the discussion exemplifies and vindicates the naturalistic approach to epistemology, according to which psychological findings provide an important contribution to understanding the epistemic standing of beliefs. (shrink)

This paper discusses the conditions for legitimate expert arrangements within a democratic order and from a deliberative systems approach. It is argued that standard objections against the political role of experts are flawed or ill-conceived. The problem that confronts us instead is primarily one of truth-sensitive institutional design: Which mechanisms can contribute to ensuring that experts are really experts and that they use their competencies in the right way? The paper outlines a set of such mechanisms. However, the challenge exceeds (...) that of producing epistemically optimal expert deliberations because a deliberative political system must also fulfil the ethical and democratic requirements of respect and inclusion. Yet, epistemic concerns justify expertise arrangements in the first place, and measures taken to make the use of expertise compatible with these requirements have to balance the potential rewards from expertise against potential deliberative costs. In the final part of the paper, the regulatory framework of a best practice expert advice system is tentatively analysed to illustrate the applicability and critical potential of our approach. (shrink)

The present century has seen renewed interest in characterizing cognition, the object of inquiry of the cognitive sciences. In this paper, I describe the problem of cognition—the absence of a positive characterization of cognition despite a felt need for one. It is widely recognized that the problem is motivated by decades of controversy among cognitive scientists over foundational questions, such as whether non-neural parts of the body or environment can realize cognitive processes, or whether plants and microbes have cognitive processes. (...) The dominant strategy for addressing the problem of cognition is to seek a dichotomous criterion that vindicates some set of controversial claims. However, I argue that the problem of cognition is also motivated by ongoing conceptual development in cognitive science, and I describe four benefits that a characterization of cognition could confer. Given these benefits, I recommend an alternative criterion of success, ecumenical extensional adequacy, on which the aim is to describe the variation in expert judgments rather than to correct this variation by taking sides in sectarian disputes. I argue that if we had an ecumenical solution to the problem of cognition, we would have achieved much of what we should want from a “mark of the cognitive”. (shrink)

I have inquired as to what sort of knowledge humans need to make justifiable claims regarding free will. I defended the thesis that humans do not have the sort of knowledge which would allow them to make such claims. Adopting the view of mind based on cognitive science and Kant’s philosophy of mind, first I laid out the characteristics of that knowledge with the help of a simulation example I devised. Then, upon investigating the epistemic relations between the different sources (...) of knowledge and the agents of a system (such as the relation between the programmer and the simulated agents as well as god and humans), I claimed that knowledge bearing those characteristics cannot be accessible to human beings. (shrink)

Data which constitute satisfactory evidence in other contexts are sometimes not treated as valid evidence in the context of scientic conrmation. I give a justicatory explanation of this fact, appealing to the incentives, biases, and social situatedness of scientists.

This paper integrates literature from the social sciences and humanities concerning the persuasive impact of visual material, highlighting issues of emotion and identification. Visuals are used not only to illustrate news and feature genres but also in advertising and campaigns that attempt to persuade their target audiences to change attitudes and behaviours. These include health, safety and charity campaigns, that attempt to socially engineer change in people’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviours. With the increasing presence of such visuals comes a more (...) emotive media environment with which people are forced to engage, and, under certain circumstances, disengage. (shrink)

In his Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Ted Porter asks how to account for the prestige and power of quantitative methods in the modern world. His answer involves two theses. One reverses a standard claim by asserting that quantification in basic sciences can often be driven by quantification in more applied areas such as government and business. The second thesis, which I call judgment replacement, asserts that quantification overcomes lack of trust in humans (...) by replacing human judgment in scientific communities and public life. Some aspects of the latter thesis are insightful and convincing. However, as a general claim, the judgment replacement thesis says that quantification and objectivity imply shallowness, superficiality and lack of subtlety. I examine one of Porter's key examples and show that as a general proposition the judgment replacement thesis gives a warped account of governmental decisions that involve a great deal of scientific input, an activity that colleagues and I have called mandated science. I show that Porter obfuscates the very features of mandated science that need the most clarification. The quantitative mentality can be superficial but it can also be complex and profound, and quantification can actually increase human judgment. The virtues of quantitative methods help account for their prestige and power. (shrink)

Presented article attempts to show sense of life perspective as a determinant of decision making. It is assumed that the sense of life perspective described as life attitudes is significant in assessment of decision problem defined in the predecision phase of the decision making process. The predicted dependence was analysed in three categories of decision: self-development, financial and voting. The research was conducted on two groups of 186 and 86 participants. Two methods were used in the research: the Life Attitude (...) Profile -Revised and the Decision Assessment Questionnaire. In statistical analysis, the canonical correlation analysis was used. The scores show that the life attitudes are correlated with the assessment factor of each tested category of decision. However, the most significant relationship is found in the self-development decision. (shrink)

Practical deliberation consists in thinking about what to do. Such deliberation is deemed rational when it conforms to certain normative requirements. What is often ignored is the role that an agent's context can play in so-called ‘failures’ of rationality. In this paper, I use recent cognitive science research investigating the effects of resource-scarcity on decision-making and cognitive function to argue that context plays an important role in determining which norms should structure an agent's deliberation. This evidence undermines the view that (...) the norms of ‘ideal’ rationality are necessary and universal requirements on deliberation. They are a solution to the problems faced by cognitively limited agents in a context of moderate scarcity. In a context of severe scarcity, the problems faced by cognitively limited agents are different and require deliberation structured by different norms. Agents reason rationally when they use the norms best suited to their context and cognitive capacities. (shrink)

A step towards a theory of consciousness would be to characterise the effect of consciousness on information processing. One set of results suggests that the effect of consciousness is to interfere with computations that are optimally performed non-consciously. Another set of results suggests that conscious, system 2 processing is the home of norm-compliant computation. This is contrasted with system 1 processing, thought to be typically unconscious, which operates with useful but error-prone heuristics. -/- These results can be reconciled by separating (...) out two different distinctions: between conscious and non-conscious representations, on the one hand, and between automatic and deliberate processes, on the other. This pair of distinctions is used to illuminate some existing experimental results and to resolve the puzzle about whether consciousness helps or hinders accurate information processing. This way of resolving the puzzle shows the importance of another category, which we label ‘type 0 cognition’, characterised by automatic computational processes operating on non-conscious representations. (shrink)

In recent years a growing number of philosophers writing about the methodology of philosophy have defended the surprising claim that philosophers do not use intuitions as evidence. In this paper I defend the contrary view that philosophers do use intuitions as evidence. I argue that this thesis is the best explanation of several salient facts about philosophical practice. First, philosophers tend to believe propositions which they find intuitive. Second, philosophers offer error theories for intuitions that conflict with their theories. Finally, (...) philosophers are more confident in rejecting theories to the extent that they have several counter examples involving diverse cases. I argue that these facts are better explained by philosophers' using intuitions as evidence than by any plausible contrary explanations. I further argue that aspects of philosophical practice that my thesis may initially seem ill-suited to explain are in fact unsurprising whether or not my thesis is true. (shrink)

We suscribe to an account of framing-effects in decision theory in terms of an inference to a background informationa by the hearer when a speaker uses a certain frame while other equivalent frames were also available. This account was sketched by Craig McKenzie. We embed it in Bolker-Jeffrey decision model - one main reason of this is that this latter model makes preferences bear on propositions. We can deduce a given anomaly or cognitive bias in a formal decision theory. This (...) leads to some philosophical considerations on the relationship between the rationality of preferences and the sensitivity to descriptions or labels of states of affairs in decision-making. (shrink)

Counting casualties in conflict zones faces both practical and ethical concerns. Drawing on procedures from risk analysis, we propose a general approach. It represents each death by standard features, having either essential value, for capturing the social and cultural meaning of individual casualties, or instrumental value, for relating patterns of casualties to possible causes and effects. We illustrate the approach with the choices involved in attempts to record casualties in Iraq and the Israel-Palestine conflict, and with natural disasters, as exemplified (...) by Hurricane Katrina. We advocate institutionalizing the approach, so that recording casualties increases understanding, rather than suspicion. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, medical ethics has gained a solid foothold in medical education and is now a required course in most medical schools. Although the field of medical ethics is by nature eclectic, moral philosophy has played a dominant role in defining both the content of what is taught and the methodology for reasoning about ethical dilemmas. Most educators largely rely on the case‐based method for teaching ethics, grounding the ethical reasoning in an amalgam of theories drawn from (...) moral philosophy, including consequentialism, deontology, and principlism.In this article we hope to make a case for augmenting the focus of education in medical ethics. We propose complementing the traditional approach to medical ethics with a more embedded approach, one that has been described by others as “microethics,” the ethics of everyday clinical practice. (shrink)

To contribute to the organizational turn in research on participatory democracy, this paper examines the effects of organizational hierarchy on individual thinking. Power corrupts, but neither political scientists nor psychologists can really tell us how. To identify mechanisms by which it does so, the paper introduces recent advances in the field of cognitive psychology, here to suspicious political theorists. The study of cognition shows that we actively make meaning, and that we do so with a discernable neurological apparatus. The paper (...) presents hierarchy as a social construct that 'fits' this apparatus in such a way as to assist the capture of meaning by the interests of power. This process of capture takes place beneath individual awareness. For this reason, the concern here amounts to ideology critique: specifically, using cognitive psychology to reveal the ideological propagation of hierarchy. The fact that hierarchy has hidden cognitive costs has important implications for the prospects of a more participatory democracy. Any democratization of organizational life is seen to turn on the capacity of participants to selectively use and manage hierarchy and to minimize its cognitive costs. This entails, among other things, a recovery of our own thinking from the knowledge processing requirements of power saturated hierarchic organizations. In its examination of the personal effects of power, the paper seeks to reveal psychological mechanisms by which power corrupts, and by which, inadvertently, we come to serve the interests of power in the very way we think. (shrink)

People often choose intuitive rather than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. The authors suggest that these intuitive biases arise because intuitions often spring to mind with subjective ease, and the subjective ease leads people to hold their intuitions with high confidence. An investigation of predictions against point spreads found that people predicted intuitive options more often than equally valid nonintuitive alternatives. Critically, though, this effect was largely determined by people's confidence in their intuitions. Across naturalistic, expert, and laboratory samples, against personally (...) determined point spreads, and even when intuitive confidence was manipulated by altering irrelevant aspects of the decision context, the authors found that decreasing intuitive confidence reduced or eliminated intuitive biases. These findings indicate that intuitive biases are not inevitable but rather predictably determined by contextual variables that affect intuitive confidence. (shrink)

[Correction Notice: An erratum for this article was reported in Vol 109 of Psychological Review. Due to circumstances that were beyond the control of the authors, the studies reported in "Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic," by Daniel G. Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer overlap with studies reported in "The Recognition Heuristic: How Ignorance Makes Us Smart," by the same authors and with studies reported in "Inference From Ignorance: The Recognition Heuristic". In addition, Figure 3 in the Psychological Review article (...) was originally published in the book chapter and should have carried a note saying that it was used by permission of Oxford University Press.] One view of heuristics is that they are imperfect versions of optimal statistical procedures considered too complicated for ordinary minds to carry out. In contrast, the authors consider heuristics to be adaptive strategies that evolved in tandem with fundamental psychological mechanisms. The recognition heuristic, arguably the most frugal of all heuristics, makes inferences from patterns of missing knowledge. This heuristic exploits a fundamental adaptation of many organisms: the vast, sensitive, and reliable capacity for recognition. The authors specify the conditions under which the recognition heuristic is successful and when it leads to the counter-intuitive less-is-more effect in which less knowledge is better than more for making accurate inferences. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers have gathered impressive evidence for the surprising conclusion that philosophers' intuitions are out of step with those of the folk. As a result, many argue that philosophers' intuitions are unreliable. Focusing on the Knobe Effect, a leading finding of experimental philosophy, we defend traditional philosophy against this conclusion. Our key premise relies on experiments we conducted which indicate that judgments of the folk elicited under higher quality cognitive or epistemic conditions are more likely to resemble those of the (...) philosopher. We end by showing how our experimental findings can help us better understand the Knobe Effect. (shrink)

Several authors have recently advocated a so-called new case for paternalism, according to which empirical findings from distinct decision sciences provide compelling reasons in favour of paternalistic interference. In their view, the available behavioural and neuro-psychological findings enable paternalists to address traditional anti-paternalistic objections and reliably enhance the well-being of their target agents. In this paper, I combine insights from decision-making research, moral philosophy and evidence-based policy evaluation to assess the merits of this case. In particular, I articulate and defend (...) three complementary arguments that, I claim, challenge even the best available calls for such case. In doing so, I identify the main justificatory challenges faced by the new paternalists and explicate the implications of these challenges for the ongoing philosophical debate about the justifiability of paternalistic interference. (shrink)

Causal reasoning is one of our most central cognitive competencies, enabling us to adapt to our world. Causal knowledge allows us to predict future events, or diagnose the causes of observed facts. We plan actions and solve problems using knowledge about cause-effect relations. Without our ability to discover and empirically test causal theories, we would not have made progress in various empirical sciences. In the past decades, the important role of causal knowledge has been discovered in many areas of cognitive (...) psychology. Despite the ubiquity of causal reasoning, textbooks of cognitive psychology have neglected this growing field. The goal of The Oxford Handbook of Causal Reasoning is to fill this gap. The handbook brings together the leading researchers in the field of causal reasoning and offers state-of-the-art presentations of theories and research. It provides introductions of competing theories of causal reasoning, and discusses its role in various cognitive functions and domains. The final section presents research from neighboring fields. 1. Causal Reasoning: An Introduction Michael R. Waldmann Part I: Theories of Causal Cognition 2. Associative Accounts of Causal Cognition Mike E. Le Pelley, Oren Griffiths, and Tom Beesley 3. Rules of Causal Judgment: Mapping Statistical Information Onto Causal Beliefs José C. Perales, Andrés Catena, Antonio Cándido, and Antonio Maldonado 4. The Inferential Reasoning Theory of Causal Learning: Toward a Multi- Process Propositional Account Yannick Boddez, Jan De Houwer, and Tom Beckers 5. Causal Invariance as an Essential Constraint for Creating a Causal Representation of the World: Generalizing the Invariance of Causal Power Patricia W. Cheng and Hongjing Lu 6. The Acquisition and Use of Causal Structure Knowledge Benjamin Margolin Rottman 7. Formalizing Prior Knowledge in Causal Induction Thomas L. Griffiths 8. Causal Mechanisms Samuel G. B. Johnson and Woo-kyoung Ahn 9. Force Dynamics and Causation Phillip Wolff and Robert Thorstad 10. Mental Models and Causation P. N. Johnson- Laird and Sangeet S. Khemlani 11. Pseudocontingencies Klaus Fiedler and Florian Kutzner 12. Singular Causation David Danks 13. Cognitive Neuroscience of Causal Reasoning Joachim T. Operskalski and Aron K. Barbey Part II: Basic Cognitive Functions 14. Visual Impressions of Causality Peter White 15. Goal-Directed Actions Bernhard Hommel 16. Planning and Control Magda Osman 17. Reinforcement Learning and Causal Models Samuel J. Gershman 18. Causation and the Probability of Causal Conditionals David E. Over 19. Causal Models and Conditional Reasoning Mike Oaksford and Nick Chater 20. Concepts as Causal Models: Categorization Bob Rehder 21. Concepts as Causal Models: Induction Bob Rehder 22. Causal Explanation Tania Lombrozo and Nadya Vasilyeva 23. Diagnostic Reasoning Björn Meder and Ralf Mayrhofer 24. Inferring Causal Relations by Analogy Keith J. Holyoak and Hee-Seung Lee 25. Causal Argument Ulrike Hahn, Roland Bluhm, and Frank Zenker 26. Causality in Decision- Making York Hagmayer and Philip M. Fernbach Part III: Domains of Causal Reasoning 27. Intuitive Theories Tobias Gerstenberg and Joshua B. Tenenbaum 28. Space, Time, and Causality Marc J. Buehner 29. Causation in Legal and Moral Reasoning David A. Lagnado and Tobias Gerstenberg 30. The Role of Causal Knowledge in Reasoning About Mental Disorders Woo-kyoung Ahn, Nancy S. Kim, and Matthew S. Lebowitz 31. Causality and Causal Reasoning in Natural Language Torgrim Solstad and Oliver Bott 32. Social Attribution and Explanation Denis Hilton Part IV: Development, Phylogeny, and Culture 33. The Development of Causal Reasoning Paul Muentener and Elizabeth Bonawitz 34. Causal Reasoning in Non-Human Animals Christian Schloegl and Julia Fischer 35. Causal Cognition and Culture Andrea Bender, Sieghard Beller, and Douglas L. Medin. (shrink)

Cognitive scientists have identified a wide range of biases and heuristics in human decision making over the past few decades. Only recently have bioethicists begun to think seriously about the implications of these findings for topics such as agency, autonomy, and consent. This article aims to provide an overview of biases and heuristics that have been identified and a framework in which to think comprehensively about the impact of them on the exercise of autonomous decision making. I analyze the impact (...) that these biases and heuristics have on the following dimensions of autonomy: understanding, intentionality, absence of alienating or controlling influence, and match between formally autonomous preferences or decisions and actual choices or actions. (shrink)