Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-01T08:58:09.342Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Early Studies in Human Reasoning: A Case Study of the Pitfalls of Interdisciplinary Work

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 April 2018

VANESSA LEHAN
VANESSA LEHAN*
Affiliation:
York University
*
*<[email protected]>
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

In this paper, I describe some of the history of work on human reasoning done by philosophers and experimental psychologists. This particular interdisciplinary work is interesting because it shows the ways that interdisciplinary research can solidify pervasive preconceptions in a particular field. Work in experimental psychology has shown that certain normative systems fail to model reasoning in natural language contexts. Thus, I will argue, philosophers could instead take this psychological research as motivation to amend these normative models or radically change our ideas about how these models are applied to reasoning in natural language.

Dans cet article, je décris une partie de l’histoire des travaux sur le raisonnement humain mené par les philosophes et les psychologues en psychologie expérimentale. Ce travail interdisciplinaire particulier est intéressant, car il montre de quelles façons la recherche interdisciplinaire peut solidifier certaines idées préconçues omniprésentes dans un domaine particulier. Les travaux en psychologie expérimentale ont démontré que certains systèmes normatifs ne parviennent pas à modéliser le raisonnement dans des contextes de langage naturel. J’affirmerai, par conséquent, que les philosophes devraient se servir de cette recherche psychologique comme motivation pour modifier ces modèles normatifs ou changer radicalement nos idées sur la manière dont ces modèles sont appliqués au raisonnement en langage naturel.

Keywords

logichuman reasoningpsychologyinterdisciplinarityheuristicsbiases
Type
Special Issue: Philosophy and its Borders
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 353 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Casscells, W., Schoenberger, A., and Graboys, T. 1978 “Interpretation by Physicians of Clinical Laboratory Results,” New England Journal of Medicine, 299 (18): 999–1000.Google Scholar
Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J. 1996 “Are Humans Good Intuitive Statisticians After All? Rethinking some Conclusions from the Literature on Judgment under Uncertainty,” Cognition 58 (1): 1–73.Google Scholar
Elio, R. (ed.) 2003 Common Sense, Reasoning, and Rationality. Oxford: University Press.Google Scholar
Evans, J.St.B.T. 1972 “Interpretation and Matching Bias in a Reasoning Task,” British Journal of Psychology 24 (1): 193–199.Google Scholar
Evans, J.St.B.T., Newstead, S.E., and Byrne, R.M.J. 1993 Human Reasoning: The Psychology of Deduction. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Fiedler, K. 1988 “The Dependence of the Conjunction Fallacy on Subtle Linguistic Factors,” Psychological Research 50 (2): 123–129.Google Scholar
Gigerenzer, G. 1991 “How to Make Cognitive Illusions Disappear: Beyond Heuristics and Biases,” European Review of Social Psychology 2 (1): 83–115.Google Scholar
Gigerenzer, G. 1996 “Rationality: Why Social Context Matters,” in Interactive Minds, Baltes, P.B., and Ursula Staudinger, M. (eds.), New York: Cambridge University Press, 319–346.Google Scholar
Hertwig, R., and Gigerenzer, G. 1999 “The ‘Conjunction Fallacy’ Revisited: How Intelligent Inferences Look Like Reasoning Errors,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 12 (4): 275–305.Google Scholar
Johnson-Laird, P., and Wason, P.C. 1972 Psychology of Reasoning: Structure and Content. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D., and Taversky, A. 1973 “On the Psychology of Prediction,” Psychological Review 80 (4): 237–251.Google Scholar
Kahneman, D., and Taversky, A. 1996 “On the Reality of Cognitive Illusions,” Psychological Review 103 (3): 582–591.Google Scholar
Lehan-Streisel, V. 2012 “Why Philosophy Needs Logical Psychologism,” Dialogue 51 (4): 575–586.Google Scholar
Nisbett, R.B., and Borgida, E. 1975 “Attribution and the Psychology of Prediction,” Journal of Personal and Social Psychology 32 (5): 932–943.Google Scholar
Oaksford, M., and Chater, N. 2007 Bayesian Rationality: The Probabilistic Approach to Human Reasoning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Piattelli-Palmarini, M. 1994 Inevitable Illusions: How Mistakes of Reason Rule Our Minds. New Jersey: Wiley.Google Scholar
Reisberg, D. 1997 Cognition: Exploring the Science of the Mind. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar
Samuels, R., Stich, S., and Bishop, M. 2002 “Ending the Rationality Wars: How to Make Disputes About Human Rationality Disappear,” in Common Sense, Reasoning and Rationality, Elio, R. (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press, 236–268.Google Scholar
Stich, S. 1990 The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Sturm, T. 2012 “The ‘Rationality Wars’ in Psychology: Where They Are and Where They Could Go,” Inquiry 55 (1): 66–81.Google Scholar
Tversky, A., and Kahneman, D. 1983 “Extensional Versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment,” Psychological Review 90 (4): 293–315.Google Scholar
Wason, P.C. 1983 “Realism and Rationality in the Selection Task,” in Thinking and Reasoning, Evans, J.St.B.T. (ed.), London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 44–75.Google Scholar