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Bayesian Rationality - The probabilistic approach to human reasoning (Paperback) Loot Price: R1,987
Discovery Miles 19 870
Bayesian Rationality - The probabilistic approach to human reasoning (Paperback): Mike Oaksford, Nick Chater

Bayesian Rationality - The probabilistic approach to human reasoning (Paperback)

Mike Oaksford, Nick Chater

Series: Oxford Cognitive Science Series

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Loot Price R1,987 Discovery Miles 19 870 | Repayment Terms: R186 pm x 12*

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Are people rational? This question was central to Greek thought; and has been at the heart of psychology, philosophy, rational choice in social sciences, and probabilistic approaches to artificial intelligence. This book provides a radical re-appraisal of conventional wisdom in the psychology of reasoning.
For almost two and a half thousand years, the Western conception of what it is to be a human being has been dominated by the idea that the mind is the seat of reason - humans are, almost by definition, the rational animal. From Aristotle to the present day, rationality has been explained by comparison to systems of logic, which distinguish valid (i.e., rationally justified) from invalid arguments. Within psychology and cognitive science, such a logicist conception of the mind was adopted wholeheartedly from Piaget onwards. Simultaneous with the construction of the logicist program in cognition, other researchers found that people appeared surprisingly and systematically illogical in some experiments. Proposals within the logicist paradigm suggested that these were mere performance errors, although in some reasoning tasks only as few as 5% of people's reasoning was logically correct.
In this book a more radical suggestion for explaining these puzzling aspects of human reasoning is put forward: the Western conception of the mind as a logical system is flawed at the very outset. The human mind is primarily concerned with practical action in the face of a profoundly complex and uncertain world. Oaksford and Chater argue that cognition should be understood in terms of probability theory, the calculus of uncertain reasoning, rather than in terms of logic, the calculus of certainreasoning. Thus, the logical mind should be replaced by the probabilistic mind - people may possess not logical rationality, but Bayesian rationality.

General

Imprint: Oxford UniversityPress
Country of origin: United Kingdom
Series: Oxford Cognitive Science Series
Release date: February 2007
First published: March 2007
Authors: Mike Oaksford • Nick Chater
Dimensions: 234 x 156 x 20mm (L x W x T)
Format: Paperback
Pages: 352
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-852449-6
Categories: Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Experimental psychology
Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
Books > Social sciences > Psychology > Cognition & cognitive psychology > Intelligence
Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Logic
Books > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Philosophy of mind
LSN: 0-19-852449-8
Barcode: 9780198524496

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