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Bayesian Rationality - The probabilistic approach to human reasoning (Paperback)
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Bayesian Rationality - The probabilistic approach to human reasoning (Paperback)
Series: Oxford Cognitive Science Series
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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.
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