Formal Epistemology and the New Paradigm Psychology of Reasoning
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Abstract
This position paper advocates combining formal epistemology and the new paradigm psychology of reasoning in the studies of conditionals and reasoning with uncertainty. The new paradigm psychology of reasoning is characterized by the use of probability theory as a rationality framework instead of classical logic, used by more traditional approaches to the psychology of reasoning. This paper presents a new interdisciplinary research program which involves both formal and experimental work. To illustrate the program, the paper discusses recent work on the paradoxes of the material conditional, nonmonotonic reasoning, and Adams’ Thesis. It also identifies the issue of updating on conditionals as an area which seems to call for a combined formal and empirical approach.
Keywords
Classical Logic Explanatory Status Argument Form Empirical Adequacy Nonmonotonic ReasoningNotes
Acknowledgments
The authors thank two anonymous reviewers and Paul Égré for useful comments. This work is supported by the FWF project P20209 and the DFG grant PF 740/2-1 (project leader: Niki Pfeifer; project within the DFG Priority Program SPP 1516 “New Frameworks of Rationality”). Niki Pfeifer is supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
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