From is to ought, and back: how normative concerns foster progress in reasoning research

Frontiers in Psychology

Vincenzo Crupi¹ 

关键词: rationality;    reasoning;    selection task;    pseudodiagnosticity;    conjunction fallacy;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00219

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Can the issue of human (ir)rationality contribute to the scientific study of reasoning? A tempting line of argument seems to indicate that it can't. Here it is. (i) To discuss diagnoses of (ir)rationality arising from research in the psychology of reasoning one has to deal with arbitration, i.e., the assessment of competing theories of what a reasoner ought to do, if rational. But (ii), by the Humean divide between is and ought, arbitration is logically independent from the description of reasoning. And clearly (iii) the main goal of psychological inquiry is just such a description. It follows that normative concerns about diagnoses of (ir)rationality cannot serve the proper scientific purposes of the psychology of reasoning, and would better be left aside altogether in this area. A recent cornerstone for this debate is Elqayam and Evans (2011). Part of their discussion is devoted to voice precisely this criticism of “normativism,” thus favoring a purely “descriptivist” approach in the study of human thinking. In our view, the above argument is essentially valid, but unsound. Premise (i), in particular, may have seemed obvious but doesn't hold on closer inspection, as we mean to show.

【 授权许可】

CC BY