New paradigm psychology of reasoning

By David E. Over. 2009

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Oaksford and Chater (O&C) have written a book of great interest, which has advanced the new paradigm in the psychology of reasoning. As their title implies, they are Bayesians and see an essential connection between reasoning and probability judgement. They attack the claim that rationality is about following the rules of logic, and argue for Bayesian probability theory as the correct normative and computation theory of human reasoning. Logic is correctly used in pure mathematics, but ordinary human beings cannot escape uncertainty. Why would people simply assume that they win a fortune if they buy a lottery ticket? By making this assumption, and then buying a ticket, they can validly infer that they will win the fortune. But that inference is useless for a rational belief and decision making about the lottery and buying a ticket. From this perspective, O&C propose new theories of conditional reasoning, Wason’s selection task (both indicative and deontic), and syllogistic inference. O&C’s book has already been extensively reviewed in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and they have extended andmodified their proposals in replies to the commentaries (Oaksford & Chater, 2009a, 2009b). I will not repeat here reviewing points that have been covered adequately in those commentaries. But I believe that fundamental aspects of O&C’s approach have not yet had sufficient attention. These are the relation between Bayesian rationality and logic, and the analysis of conditional reasoning in termsof the centralBayesian concept of conditional probability. The bestway to introduce these topics, and explain O&C’s contribution to the new paradigm, is by describing the old ‘‘logicist’’ paradigm, as O&C call it. I will argue that their use of ‘‘logicist’’ is misleading and prefer ‘‘binary paradigm’’ for the old one. The best example of a book in the binary paradigm is Johnson-Laird and Byrne (1991). In their mental model theory, every proposition is only THINKING & REASONING, 2009, 15 (4), 431–438

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7b019b842b0893207b302243ba967d8d8a67430

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Citations in the corpus

Logic, probability, and human reasoning. (2015, unknown): “These arguments motivated the turn to probability – a pivot that its proponents refer to as the ‘new paradigm’ [25–29].”
Dynamic inference and everyday conditional reasoning in the new paradigm (2013, unknown): “While we are in broad agreement with Fernbach and Erb’s (in press) approach, we do think that it skirts over some psychological processes that are likely to influence these inferences. First, alternative causes may well come into the picture for MP. Suppose participants consider a particular defeate”
Belief bias in informal reasoning (2012, background): “Psychologists of reasoning are becoming increasingly influenced by Bayesian theory, both from a normative and descriptive viewpoint, in what is being called the new paradigm psychology of reasoning (Evans, 2012; Harris, Hsu, & Madsen, 2012 this issue; Oaksford & Hahn, 2004; Over, 2009).”
Uncertainty and the de Finetti tables (2013, background): “The new Bayesian, or probabilistic, paradigm in the psychology of reasoning (Oaksford & Chater, 2007, 2009; Over, 2009; Pfeifer & Kleiter, 2010) implies a close parallel relationship between assertions of the indicative conditional of natural language, if A then C, and other uses of conditionals, pa”
Questions and challenges for the new psychology of reasoning (2012, background): “Only time will tell which of these approaches will work best, but at least we are agreed, as are other advocates of the new paradigm (e.g., Bonnefon, 2011; Over, 2009) that integration of the literatures on reasoning and decision making is another essential objective for the future.”
Must, knowledge, and (in)directness (2016, unknown): “Typically, this scale is thought to be closely related or identical to the conditional probability of the conclusion given the premises (Oaksford and Chater 2007; Over 2009).”
Reasoning to and from belief: Deduction and induction are still distinct (2013, background): “Even if we become certain of the premise about cows, after much scientific study, we could not be certain of the conclusion about horses, although we could become more confident in it through a process of belief revision that is also not p-valid (Oaksford & Chater, 2007; Over, 2009).”
Betting on conditionals (2010, background): “…paradigm in the psychology of reasoning, with new probability theories of the natural language indicative conditional (Chater & Oaksford, 2009; Evans, 2007; Evans & Over, 2004; Manktelow, Over, & Elqayam, in press; Oaksford & Chater, 2001, 2007, 2009; Over, 2009; Pfeifer & Kleiter, 2006, 2010).”
The psychology of inferring conditionals from disjunctions: A probabilistic study (2012, background): “Probabilistic analyses from a subjectivist, or Bayesian, point of view have been increasingly applied in cognitive psychology over recent years, and these analyses have led to a new probabilistic paradigm in the psychology of reasoning (Chater & Oaksford, 2009; Over, 2009).”