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This book brings together an influential sequence of papers that
argue for a radical re-conceptualisation of the psychology of
inference, and of cognitive science more generally. The papers
demonstrate that the thesis that logic provides the basis of human
inference is central to much cognitive science, although the
commitment to this view is often implicit. They then note that
almost all human inference is uncertain, whereas logic is the
calculus of certain inference. This mismatch means that logic is
not the appropriate model for human thought. Oaksford and Chater's
argument draws on research in computer science, artificial
intelligence and philosophy of science, in addition to experimental
psychology. The authors propose that probability theory, the
calculus of uncertain inference, provides a more appropriate model
for human thought. They show how a probabilistic account can
provide detailed explanations of experimental data on Wason's
selection task, which many have viewed as providing a paradigmatic
demonstration of human irrationality. Oaksford and Chater show that
people's behaviour appears irrational only from a logical point of
view, whereas it is entirely rational from a probabilistic
perspective. The shift to a probabilistic framework for human
inference has significant implications for the psychology of
reasoning, cognitive science more generally, and forour picture of
ourselves as rational agents.
This book brings together an influential sequence of papers that
argue for a radical re-conceptualisation of the psychology of
inference, and of cognitive science more generally. The papers
demonstrate that the thesis that logic provides the basis of human
inference is central to much cognitive science, although the
commitment to this view is often implicit. They then note that
almost all human inference is uncertain, whereas logic is the
calculus of certain inference. This mismatch means that logic is
not the appropriate model for human thought.
Oaksford and Chater's argument draws on research in computer
science, artificial intelligence and philosophy of science, in
addition to experimental psychology. The authors propose that
probability theory, the calculus of uncertain inference, provides a
more appropriate model for human thought. They show how a
probabilistic account can provide detailed explanations of
experimental data on Wason's selection task, which many have viewed
as providing a paradigmatic demonstration of human irrationality.
Oaksford and Chater show that people's behavior appears irrational
only from a logical point of view, whereas it is entirely rational
from a probabilistic perspective. The shift to a probabilistic
framework for human inference has significant implications for the
psychology of reasoning, cognitive science more generally, and for
our picture of ourselves as rational agents.
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.
The rational analysis method, first proposed by John R. Anderson,
has been enormously influential in helping us understand high-level
cognitive processes.
The Probabilistic Mind is a follow-up to the influential and highly
cited 'Rational Models of Cognition' (OUP, 1998). It brings
together developments in understanding how, and how far, high-level
cognitive processes can be understood in rational terms, and
particularly using probabilistic Bayesian methods. It synthesizes
and evaluates the progress in the past decade, taking into account
developments in Bayesian statistics, statistical analysis of the
cognitive 'environment' and a variety of theoretical and
experimental lines of research. The scope of the book is broad,
covering important recent work in reasoning, decision making,
categorization, and memory. Including chapters from many of the
leading figures in this field,
The Probabilistic Mind will be valuable for psychologists and
philosophers interested in cognition.
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